Harder (Caroline & West #2)(3)

“You don’t have to make a big fuss,” I say. “I’m just here to help.”

Without another word, he slams the door and gets behind the wheel, and we’re on our way.

I thought Eugene was a city, but after we leave the airport we’re instantly in the middle of nowhere, and that’s where we stay. It’s so green, it makes me thirsty.

West turns right, heading toward the mountains.

It’s nearly seven, so we won’t get to Silt until ten. I don’t know where I’m staying tonight.

I’m going to be sitting in this truck with West in the dark.

I take off my sweater. West fiddles with the air conditioner, reaches across me to redirect a vent, and suddenly it’s blasting in my face. My sweat-clammy skin goes cold, goose bumps and instantaneous hard nipples.

He turns the fan down.

“You’re doing landscaping?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

“Do you like it?”

The look he gives me reminds me of my sister Janelle’s cat. Janelle used to squirt it between the eyes with a water gun to keep it from jumping on her countertops, and it would glare back at her with exactly that expression of incredulous disdain.

“Sorry,” I say.

Then I try to count up how many times I’ve apologized since I walked out of the airport.

Too many. I’m letting him get to me when I promised myself on the plane I wouldn’t let anything get to me. This is a convoluted situation. Someone’s dead, guns are involved, West was torn up enough to call me—my job is to be unflappable. I’m not going to get mad at him or act heartbroken. I’m not going to moon around or cry or throw myself on him in a fit of lust. I’ll just be here, on his side.

I’ll do that because I promised him I would when he left Iowa. I made him swear to call me, and I told him he could count on me to be his friend.

He called. Here I am.

After marinating in tobacco-scented silence for a while, I find myself scanning West all over again, looking for similarities instead of differences. His ears are still too small. The scar hasn’t vanished from his eyebrow, and the other one tilts up same as always. His mouth is the same.

Always, for me, it was his mouth.

The scent coming off him is like a hot day in the deep woods—like a fresh-cut Christmas tree—but it’s not quite either of those. On the seat between us, there’s a pair of work gloves he must have tossed there. I want to pick them up, put them on, wiggle my fingers around. Instead, I look at his thigh. His faded shorts, speckled with minuscule pieces of clinging bark. His kneecap.

I look at his arm from the curve of his shoulder to the banded edge of his sleeve where the polo shirt cuts across his biceps. He doesn’t have a tan line. He must work with his shirt off, and the thought is more than I know what to do with.

The last time I saw him, we were kissing at the airport, holding each other, saying goodbye. Even though I know everything’s different now, it doesn’t entirely feel different. It’s cruel that it’s possible for him to have told me what he did and for me to still be sitting here, soaking him up.

I’m not over him. I’ve tried to reason myself into it, but I’m learning reason doesn’t have anything to do with love, and West has always made me softer than I wanted to be, weaker than was good for me.

Before we crashed and burned, though, I liked the person I was with him. He made me vulnerable, but he helped me be stronger, too.

“You want to fill me in on what’s going on?” I ask.

A muscle ticks in his jaw. “I’ve been at work. I don’t know what’s going on.”

“What was happening when you went to work?”

“My dad was dead.”

“Where’s Frankie?”

Last I heard, his sister and his mom were living with his dad at the trailer park where West grew up. West had dropped out of college and moved home to Oregon so he could protect them, but there’s only so much you can do to save someone who doesn’t want to be saved.

His mom wouldn’t leave his dad, and West wouldn’t go near the trailer with his dad living in it. That meant West wasn’t seeing Frankie as often as he would have liked. It bothered him not being able to get close enough to protect her the way he wanted to.

“She’s out at my grandma’s,” he says. “I have to pick her up.”

“Does she seem okay?”

“I can’t tell.”

“She wasn’t there, was she? When he got …”

“Mom says she was at a sleepover.”

His knuckles are white on the steering wheel. I watch the color drain from his skin all the way to the base of each finger as he squeezes tighter.

“You don’t believe her?”

“I’m not sure.”

Then we’re quiet. He’s got a cut on his right hand in the space between his thumb and his index finger. The skin is half scabbed over, pink and puffy around the edges with curls of dry skin. I can see two places where it’s cracked.

A burn. Or a bad scrape.

Back in Putnam, I’d have known where he got a cut like that. I’d have nagged him to put a Band-Aid on it or at least spread some lotion around so it would heal better. I probably would have made a disgusted face and told him to cover it up.

I wouldn’t have wanted to touch it, the way I do now—to reach out and stroke that newborn pink skin with my fingertip.