Harder (Caroline & West #2)(34)

I break them open, roll them between my fingers, emptying the loose tobacco into a mound.

I don’t know why. I just do it. I do it and keep doing it, swallowing over the ache in my heart and the numb cold I’m rolling between my fingers until it’s done and I can’t take it back.

Then I return to his room, dig out that note I wrote him, and put it on the table. At the bottom of the page, I write a new message.

If you eat enough tobacco, it’s poisonous. Hell of a lot quicker than smoking them.



I put a fork next to the pile I’ve made, sweep all the empty papers and filters and cellophane wrappers into the garbage can that I find beneath the sink, and then look at the little scene I’ve created.

I’m losing it.

But I feel curiously detached from having to care about what’s normal and what isn’t. Curiously entitled to my behavior, my stalking, whatever displays of emotion I feel like directing at him.

I don’t know if what he did to me is what entitles me, or if it’s that folder in his bedroom. My name on Frankie’s school form. Every sweet moment that ever passed between us.

Either way.

I gather up my books, find the porch light, and flip it off before I let myself out.

I sit on the top step beside the front door and look at the sky.

There’s a wilderness of stars up there. I lay back and let myself wander through them until I’m lost—even more lost than I already was.

I trace the shapes of those lights with my fingertip, looking for patterns, and I think about the first time West kissed me on the roof of the house where I grew up. How we went up there to look at the stars. How we were stoned, and I loved him so much, his mouth on mine, his body and his heat and his beautiful face.

The tears that fall down my temples and soak into my hair are hot, but I don’t brush them away. It feels good to cry.

It feels good to be here, waiting for West in this forest of stars.

When I hear his truck in the driveway I’ll get up and go, seal myself inside my own car before I have to talk to him, because tonight’s not the night. Tonight, I made him something to find, and that’s as far as I’m going to push it. For now.

Until he drives up, I’ll be here, waiting for guidance.

Waiting for a light to follow, for peace to help me find my way.


On Monday morning, a few days after I killed West’s cigarettes, I walk to my seminar with Bridget.

When we pass the art building, he’s there, of course. Standing by himself. Smoking.

Bridget is talking, telling me about a movie she went to see with Krishna over the weekend, but I’m veering away from her. I’m walking right up to West, plucking the cigarette from his fingers, and grinding it out in the bare dirt at his feet.

His eyes look green next to the pale green glass of the art building, the white of his teeth when he smiles.

“There’s more where that came from,” he says.

His voice is so soft, I can feel it moving over my skin like the pads of his fingers, trailing over my nipples. “I figured.”

I feel soft. My face, my eyes, my mouth. I want to press against him. Let his hard edges sink into me. Reshape me. Change me.

I’ll bounce back after he’s gone. I always do.

He shakes his head. Pulls out his pack of cigarettes and extracts another one. Taps it against the cellophane wrapper and lights it up.

He blows smoke over the top of my head and says, “Expensive habit to break.”

“Me or the cigarettes?”

He squints as he inhales. “You should stop it with Frankie.”

“Maybe we should get together sometime,” I suggest. “Have a meal. Talk things over.”

“You should stop it with that, too.”

“With what?”

He points at me. Points at his chest.

I guess I’m supposed to be discouraged.

This time, I take the cigarette from his lips.

I put my mouth where his mouth was, and I inhale carefully, letting the taste of him move through me. Pulling West into my body, through the chambers of my heart.

He watches me exhale.

I drop this cigarette, too, and grind it out.

Bridget touches my wrist and says we’re going to be late, we’re already late, but I don’t stop watching West until we turn a corner and he disappears from sight.

Hands in his back pockets. Elbows out to the sides.

His smile fading as he watches me go.


I start to notice music. Not like I’m hearing music in my head, but like I’m just now tuning in to the music that’s already everywhere, all the time.

The last week of classes before fall break—the week after I destroyed West’s cigarettes, the week I pick Frankie up from school three times, the week I ace two midterms and set the curve on my Latin exam—I hear sad ballads at the coffee shop.

I hear pop songs on the radio.

I hear a low drone of sound that floats down the hall to my room from Krishna’s.

It draws me to his doorway, where I find Bridget sitting crossways on his bed, feet propped up on the backs of his thighs, book in her lap. Krishna lying on his stomach, a book open by his head, a chunky calculator resting by his left hand, his pencil scrawling over a notebook page making notations I can’t understand.

He’s tuned in to those numbers and symbols, but it’s the music that catches me.