Harder (Caroline & West #2)(24)

He’s not dumb enough to believe this, but he’s too polite to say. “Do you have twenty minutes?”

“I’ve got to pick up my sister.”

My paycheck deposit showed up yesterday, and I promised I’d take her to buy a few things for school. She grew out of all her leggings and stuff from last year.

“I was hoping to talk to you about that scholarship.”

This isn’t the day, then. The you-f*cked-my-wife day.

As the realization hits me, so does my disappointment.

I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop with Dr. T for six f*cking years, and it’s getting so I want it to. I want to be accused by him, attacked by him, f*cking blamed by this man for every wrong thing I’ve done.

I’m a villain. I deserve venom. A kick in the ribs. Disgust.

He claps a hand on my shoulder, and I flinch.

“I know you’ve had a hard year. I understand why you felt you had to leave Putnam, but it seems to me you’ve got an opportunity here to turn things around.”

The shame. Jesus, the shame, crawling all over me. I’d do almost anything to get out of my body right now, get away. Part of why I left Silt in the first place was so I’d never have to sit across a table from Dr. T, listening to him ramble on about my best interests while Rita slid her bare toes up my leg.

“I’ve really got to go,” I say.

“I’ll ride along.”

He walks over to the passenger side and lets himself into the truck, just like that—a reminder of how easy it used to be with him. Walking the course together, shooting the shit on his back deck with the view out over the green and the sun sinking down into the ocean.

I liked him.

I thought if I worked hard enough, put Silt far enough behind me, I could be Dr. T—trousers and four-hundred-dollar shoes and a white shirt he doesn’t have to worry about staining because his Mexican housemaid drops off his dry cleaning and picks it back up wrapped in plastic every Tuesday.

I wonder if everybody else’s dreams begin to look like dumb f*cking nonsense after a dose of reality, or if it’s just mine.

He buckles his seat belt. I back onto the highway.

“I talked to someone in the financial aid office about your case last week,” he says.

“You shouldn’t be doing that.”

“I know you turned me down, but I keep hoping you’ll change your mind. You have so much potential. You remind me of the way I was at your age, and I can’t stand to see you throw it away. I keep thinking there’s got to be a way I can do this for you.”

“You’ve done more than enough already. And I’m sorry about that tuition that got wasted spring semester. I’m gonna see about paying that back to you.”

“You don’t have to pay it back.”

“I want to.”

He turns in the seat, fixes me with that sharp gaze of his. “West, I’ve been trying to see this whole situation from your perspective. I know taking money was always hard for you. I’ve said more than once that the way I see it, money’s a neutral thing, not good or bad. But if I can use what I have to help someone like you, that’s not neutral, it’s overwhelmingly positive. I understand it’s hard for you to see it that way, okay? That’s the reason I’ve hoped that this scholarship might be something you could accept. Because it’s not me, not my money. This is a Putnam scholarship. They’re only going to give it to you because you deserve it.”

I don’t deserve anything.

“All you have to do is fill out some paperwork, and the scholarship is yours. The college tells me they already have records showing you’re a student of exceptional merit.”

Exceptional merit. I’d laugh if the phrase didn’t make my throat tighten.

I licked your wife’s cunt. Up against this truck. While Caroline watched.

“It could be good for your sister, too,” he says. “I heard she’s living with you now. You could take her along. Give her a fresh start.”

I watch the white line on the highway, willing my mind to go blank.

I can’t think about what he said, because when I start thinking about shit like whether I could take Frankie and leave, just go, I pore over every angle of it. I work through every possible way it could go down, and then I shut them off, one after another.

I don’t have to reach for impossibilities because they’re all right there in front of me—the impossibility of tearing Frankie away from everything she knows.

The impossibility of juggling work and child care and classes all at the same time.

The impossibility of taking one more favor from a man I’ve screwed over in every conceivable way.

I can’t tell myself I deserve to, not when I can conjure up the smell of Rita Tomlinson’s perfume and the blank white horror in Caroline’s expression.

Wanting things makes me miserable.

Wanting things makes me look at trees and guardrails when I’m driving, makes me ponder whether I should buy a bottle of whiskey and take it out to Bo’s, drink it in the driveway until I’m ready to unlock his gun cabinet, load up his .48, and put an end to this.

“I can’t,” I say.

“You can,” Dr. T insists.

“No. I can’t. I just f*cking can’t.”

After that, he’s quiet. Too quiet.