Harder (Caroline & West #2)(20)

His eyes cut to me.

“I never told you that?” I ask. “Yeah. Voices in my head, insomnia, misery. The whole thing. And you were the one who pulled me out of that. You were.”

“You did it yourself.”

“Everyone does everything themselves, West. By themselves, to themselves. Everyone. But sometimes they do it because they have a reason, and you were my reason. You told me I was fine, I wasn’t broken, I wasn’t wrong, and I believed you. You made a difference.”

I knot my hands in my lap. Not sure now that I should be saying any of this.

Never sure, actually, that I could make any kind of difference for him the way he did for me.

“I’m not the person you need to hear it from, I guess.”

There’s a plane low in the sky. Landing at the airport. I look at his face again. “But I might be the only person who’s going to tell you. Your dad sucked. Your family … well, nobody wants to hear anything bad about their family, but West, they’re never going to stop taking things from you. Not ever. There’s never going to be a day when you look around at your mom and your sister and your grandma and say, Okay, they’re fine. I can go live my life the way I want now. It’s not going to happen, any more than I’m ever going to get my sex pictures off the Internet. You can’t wait for it to happen. What you have to do is find a way to get out from under it, knowing it’s never going away. You have to make your own life, because if you don’t, you just won’t get to have one at all, and that’s the worst f*cking thing I can imagine.”

He makes a sound in his throat. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know how he feels, but this is the only chance I’ll get. I’m going to lay it all down in front of him, because he taught me how to cut through the bullshit, and it’s one of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned.

“You know, that’s the thing that made me cry the hardest last night, even after what you did to me? Even with how mad I am, how f*cking gross I feel every time I even look at your mouth or think about hearing what I heard—thinking about how you made me hear it—it’s even worse to think I’m going to leave and you’re going to drive back to Silt and die there. Die there every day.”

I swipe at my face. Mascara all over my hand. What a disaster.

“It’s sick, you know that?” I say. “This heart of mine, limping along?”

“I don’t get it,” he says. “I don’t get why you’re being …”

“Because I love you. I don’t want to, okay? I think there are some things that are so hard, you shouldn’t have to do them, only no one can take them from you. There are feelings so sick, so obviously unhealthy, you shouldn’t have to feel them. But there they are. I still love you, and I’m not ever going to see you again, not ever. You did that to us. Not your dad or your family, just you. So I could hit you. I could rage at you right now, and call you every ugly name I know, and I know a lot. I could tell you how much I’m hurting, or I could get out of the car, slam the door, hitchhike to the airport because f*ck you, f*ck you, f*ck you, West, how could you do this to me? How?”

He wipes his palms up the back of his head. Drops his forehead onto the steering wheel and covers his face with his forearms.

“What I can’t do is pretend I don’t know what you did,” I say. “Or pretend I don’t still care about you.”

I look one more time at him. All of him. His lowered head and his shoulders, his torso wrapped in a blue T-shirt, those long legs sticking out of his shorts.

We’re so far from where we were when we met.

Lost in the wilderness, and there isn’t any way back.

“Don’t waste your whole life,” I tell him. “You’re not going to get another one.”

Collapsed over the wheel, he turns the ignition.

I can hear him breathing. Thick, deep breaths.

It’s five full minutes before he’s got it under control.

I’m calm now. Emptied out.

When he lifts his head, he flips open the glove compartment, careful not to touch my knee, and extracts his cigarettes. The lighter is out of reach.

I pluck it out and give it to him.

I find his bracelet in my purse and leave it in the glove box while he watches. It looks like a child’s token.

“Give up the f*cking cancer sticks, too,” I say.

When he exhales smoke out the window, I watch it disappear into the sky.

I remind myself that this place we’re in now—every green thing I see—all of this came after the fire and ash.

There’s hope in the world.

I just have to find it.





West


Fade to black.

That was my plan.

Some f*cking plan.

Caroline left the morning after my dad’s funeral. I spent the next four weeks in Silt, and the screen of my personal Wild West movie was supposed to darken from the edges to the middle until there was nothing left but a quarter-size hole, a nickel, a dime, nothing.

Show’s over. Welcome to the rest of your life. Enjoy your time in this paradise of emotional numbness.

Drink some beers. Fuck some chicks. Rock on.

I was delusional. I can only guess, now, that my delusions were supposed to protect me, because it’s not like any part of my life had given me reason to believe awful shit gets less awful through repetition. Worrying you’re not going to be able to buy groceries—worrying your baby sister’s going to cough her lungs out from the croup—worrying you’re going to die alone and never again make love to the only woman you want—it always f*cking sucks.