Harder (Caroline & West #2)(42)

“Yes.”

“You want to wait a sec and find out what it is I’m asking about?”

That makes her smile. “No.”

“Because I was asking about Frankie.”

“Hmm.” Her grin is self-satisfied. Knowing.

I’ve seen her smile like that when she had my balls in her palm and she was trying to decide just how she wanted to suck my dick to most effectively drive me out of my mind.

“You think I’m f*cking up with Frankie, or you think I’m f*cking up in general?” I ask.

She just looks at me with her eyes big and round, like, Go on.

“What else?” I ask. “I’m f*cking up with you, too? Fucking up my whole future? Fucking up with school, and—and just more or less everything, huh?”

She’s inclined her head, like she wants to nod along with every question I’m asking. It’s patronizing, but I don’t mind. She’s got on jeans and this soft shirt with buttons partway down the front, and it looks like it’s been through the wash a thousand times, except I’ve never seen it before. I think she must have bought it that way. It’s unbuttoned so low that the way she’s sitting just now, I can see the middle part of her bra. There’s a useless little bow there, sewed onto that spot. Her jeans are tight and faded across her thighs, and everything about her clothes and her hair falling down out of the knot she tied it up in makes me want to rumple her.

Makes me want to test the texture of those jeans, find out if her shirt is soft against my face, if it’s softer than her breasts, even though I know nothing is.

It doesn’t help that her shirt is the exact color of her *.

“Just say whatever you want,” I tell her. “You look like you’re gonna die if you don’t.”

She shakes her head. “I’m not saying anything until you do.”

“What am I supposed to say?”

She sips her beer. “Something about how you’re doing.”

“I’m doing fine.”

That gets me a huff of laughter. “Something true about how you’re doing.”

“You say that like I’m lying all the time.”

She considers this. “No, you’re not lying. You’re bullshitting me. Which is funny, since I know exactly how you feel about bullshit.”

The first real conversation I had with her, I gave her a hard time for telling me she was fine when she wasn’t. It was bullshit, I told her. The way people went around all the time suffering and claiming to be fine—why couldn’t they just say what they felt? Why did everyone have to be so f*cking polite when they were dying inside?

That was the night she told me that every day she lived through since her pictures turned up online was the worst day of her life.

I understand what she meant better than I did a year ago.

I drain my beer and set it on the coffee table. I’m tired, buzzing, confused about why she’s dressed so touchable, sitting relaxed on my couch, sipping her beer, watching me like she can see inside my head. Like she knows exactly how f*cked-up it is in there, but she doesn’t mind it one bit.

“You want me to tell you something true?” I ask.

She nods.

“I want to kiss you.”

I watch the heat rise up her throat, turning her skin the same color as her shirt.

“Then why don’t you?” she asks.

I can’t remember.

Swear to God, I can’t f*cking remember. Maybe there’s no reason at all.

Maybe I never had a good reason, and I’m just a moron. Maybe I’ve always been a moron. Which raises the question why she’d go to all this trouble to get me back in her life.

She’s looking over my shoulder at the closed blinds. Her forehead’s wrinkled, her eyes out of focus the way they get when she’s thinking.

“I had to read this story for class,” she says. “It was one I already knew—O. Henry, ‘The Gift of the Magi.’ Have you ever read it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I bet you know it—it’s that story about the couple, they’re really poor, and the woman wants to buy something nice for her husband for Christmas, so she cuts off her hair and sells it to buy him a chain for his watch. Only he wants to do something for her, too, and he sells his watch to buy her combs for her hair.” She glances at me. “What?”

“I never liked that story.”

“Me, neither. But tell me why you don’t.”

“It’s supposed to be romantic, right? This big sacrifice they make, you go, ‘Aw, true spirit of Christmas.’ But it’s not.”

“How so?”

“You can tell me they’re happy under their Christmas tree because they’ve got their love, but they had love in the first place, right? Love was never the question. The question was what’s he got to give her other than love? He can’t keep the house warm. He can’t buy her a cruise to the Caribbean or whatever the f*ck. All he’s got is a watch, and he decides, Okay, I’m gonna sell the watch and give her something that makes her feel beautiful. Only it doesn’t work, because now she’s bald, and that probably makes her even more miserable than she already was. It’s a depressing f*cking story.”

I run my hand over the back of my neck, self-conscious. I don’t know where all those words came from.