Harder (Caroline & West #2)(28)

Everyone wanted to talk about it, but really they wanted to tell me how to feel.

It ticked me off that there was so obviously a right and a wrong way to respond to what West had done, and that everyone seemed to think I was doing it wrong—in denial, confused, lost, deflecting.

Fuck that. I felt how I felt. I wanted what I wanted.

Outside, the weather turned cold, then colder.

I saw West everywhere, and I burned.


I’m driving back to campus when I spot him getting out of his truck at the Kum and Go.

I check that the oncoming lane is clear, jerk the wheel to the left in a U-turn, and pull up to the curb across the street.

My hands tremble in my lap as I watch him walk into the store. He’s wearing short sleeves over long sleeves. His shoulders stretch the fabric. I drink him in—that back, that ass, those long legs in boots.

I get wet just from looking. Greedy. Full of an anxious, amped-up craving for contact.

I want to talk to him, push into him, hit him, f*ck him. Crash into him and find out what happens next. Something. Anything.

The plate-glass front of the shop is crowded with brightly colored posters and signs, but I can see the top of West’s head at the counter. I lean closer to the windshield. My throat is hot, my breasts full.

I left Silt six weeks ago. West’s been back in Putnam fifteen days.

Every time I see him, it gets a little stronger.

The first time I saw West after he came back, he was outside the art building, and I was walking with Bridget to my seminar. A clutch of smokers gathered by the door, West off to the side by himself, blowing a white cloud into the air.

He didn’t greet me.

I knew to expect it. He’d done it to Krishna already. He’s doing it to everyone.

West works and goes to class and stands off by himself, because that’s how he wants it.

I spot him out windows, passing by the giant phallic sculpture at the center of our campus.

I see him in the library at the circulation desk, waiting to be helped.

I go out for groceries and discover the shape of his head, the curve of his shoulder, as he holds a package of cold ground beef in his hands by the butcher’s counter and studies the label instead of turning around to say hi to me.

When I close my eyes, there’s his defiant, arrogant face as he opens the door of the truck after he finished eating Mrs. Tomlinson’s *. He wipes his mouth, even though he never did that. He tilts up his chin and says, How about that, Caroline? Am I good enough for you now? Still want to rescue me? Still think you can love me? Huh?

When I sit on the bed in my rented room and look out at the alley behind the house, an apple core three feet from the garbage can, I see West resting his forehead against the steering wheel of Bo’s truck, shuddering by the side of the road.

None of what I feel is as simple as anger or betrayal or disgust, because there’s always this other thing.

The thing that makes me do a U-turn when I spot his truck.

The thing that pulls me out of my car when he emerges from the store with a carton of cigarettes, free arm swinging, keys glinting in the bright light of this sunny September day.

I can see how angry he is from twenty feet away.

He can be as angry as he needs to be, and I’ll still feel like this whenever he comes near. I can’t help it.

He stops when he spots me. I don’t wave or speak or beckon to him. All I do is watch. Witness him.

You exist. I exist. Here we are.

He gets in his car and drives off toward campus, and I track his progress until he turns the corner.

I’m smiling for no reason.

I just feel so alive.


Some things can’t be unseen once you’ve seen them.

This is what I’m thinking the next morning, standing stock-still on the threshold of our kitchen, clutching a water bottle in my hand and transfixed by the unexpected sight of Bridget and Krishna making out.

It’s seven-thirty in the morning. I was, prior to this moment, barely awake.

Now I am so awake.

Awake enough to notice a lot of things other than the obvious thing, which is my teeny little freckled redhead best friend tongue-wrestling with the resident campus manwhore.

Like, I notice that they’re both in their running clothes, and they smell ripe. After two years of rooming with Bridget, who runs track, I’m more than used to the odor of warm armpits and high-tech fabric, but this time it’s coming off both of them together.

Their mouths are making this wet smacking sort of noise. Krishna is owning Bridget. One-hand-on-the-back-of-her-head, one-right-above-her-ass, bending-her-backward-over-the-counter owning her.

His hair and shoulders are wet. Her thighs. Their arms.

Rain. It’s raining out there. The rain is drumming against the house, and Bridget is kind of … squeaking? She’s making a noise that’s so obviously compliant that it makes me think of animals, mating animals—like, hamsters, maybe, which I wish it didn’t because I once actually saw hamsters mating and it isn’t something I want to see again, or think about, and Jesus, neither is this.

And yet I can’t move.

I can’t move, because this isn’t a first kiss or a fourth kiss or an eighth kiss. They have done this many, many times. This has been happening.

When?

When did this start happening?

Krishna’s hand is sliding beneath Bridget’s back, rucking up her shirt, his skin so dark against hers, and my brain is just hammering at me, when, when, when? Last school year? Over the summer, when Bridget took more than one long weekend to visit Krishna in Chicago for reasons that now seem flimsy as tissue paper?