Harder (Caroline & West #2)(5)
“The twenty-eighth.”
“Two weeks.”
“Two and a half.”
“You’re not gonna be here two and a half weeks.”
“Whatever you need.”
West looks out the driver’s-side window. “You shouldn’t have come.”
I’ve already thought the same thing, but it hurts to hear him say it. “It’s nice to see you, too, baby.”
“I didn’t invite you.”
“How sweet of you to notice, I have lost a little weight.”
His eyes narrow. “You look scrawny.”
Stung, I drop the act. “I’ll be sure to put on a few pounds for your visual enjoyment.”
“If you want to say Fuck you, West, go ahead and say it.”
“Fuck you, West.”
His jawline tightens. When he reaches for the radio, I knock his hand away.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with you,” he says.
“You’re supposed to let me help.”
“I don’t want you anywhere near this shit.”
“That’s sweet, but too bad.”
That earns me a criminal’s glare. “You don’t belong in Silt.”
“I guess I’m about to find that out for myself.”
“I guess you are.”
He reaches for the stereo again. This time, I let him turn it on.
I think about how we’re driving toward the Pacific Ocean, which I’ve never seen.
I think about West and what I want from him. Why I’m here.
I don’t have any answers. I’m not kidding myself, though. Inside a makeup pouch at the bottom of my suitcase, there’s a leather bracelet with his name on it.
I shouldn’t be here, but I am.
I’m not leaving until I know there’s no chance I’ll ever wear that bracelet again.
The road drops away from the pavement on West’s side of the truck.
The guardrail doesn’t look like it would be much help if he yanked the wheel to the left and sent us sailing out over the edge.
Not that he’d do that.
I don’t think.
We climb up and up through a corridor of trees, winding around broad curves to the sound of rushing water. The light fades.
I can’t get over the green. It’s green in Iowa in August, too, but there the color hugs the ground in long rows and flat lawns. Here, it’s all trees. More trees than I’ve ever seen in one place, crowding the road and pulling my gaze up to the sky.
After a while, we descend, sweeping in slow, easy curves downhill as though we’re skiing on an extravagant scale. This heaved-up world is our field of moguls, the tires rocking us back and forth like freshly waxed skis on perfect powder.
I’ve been to the mountains, skiing in Telluride and Aspen with my family, but Oregon is different. The road’s so narrow, the forest so dense. It feels primeval, unfinished.
We swoop and curve. The silence stretches out and grows stale.
This drive is interminable.
West reaches past my knees to open the glove box. Careful not to touch me, he extracts a pack of cigarettes.
“You’re smoking now?”
“Hand me the lighter, would you?”
I can see it—cheap bright pink plastic—but it’s too deep for him to reach. I leave it where it is.
“Smoking is disgusting.”
We hit a straight section. He leans over me as far as he has to in order to retrieve the lighter, which is far enough to press his shoulder into my knee.
The lighter snicks and sparks when he sits up, the smell of the catching tobacco acrid, then sugary. The ripples from our brief moment of contact move through my body, lapping against my skin for a long time.
West blows smoke in a stream out the window to dissipate in the dark.
I feel like smoke, my edges dissolving with every mile that passes, every flick of his hand over the wand that makes the high beams come on, a flood of light, then another flick, dimming to yellow. The darkness concentrates his potency, makes him more solid and me less substantial, immaterial, unreal.
When he leans forward to turn down the radio—an obvious prelude to conversation—I have to pull myself back from somewhere far away.
“What’s going on with Nate?” he asks.
“Nothing.”
“He stopped posting the pictures?”
“As far as I can tell. They pop up sometimes, but that’s going to happen. I don’t think it’s him doing it anymore.”
Nate spent most of last school year posting and reposting our sex pictures online while I wasted dozens of hours contacting site owners to get them removed. It was the world’s least fun game of whack-a-mole.
He finally stopped after I took the problem to the dean’s office. When the college began to investigate, I hoped he would end up expelled for violating the campus technology policy, but it didn’t happen. He’d been too sneaky, and he’s a convincing liar. How else would he have convinced me he was a nice person for all the time we were going out?
The college let him off the hook with a suspension of his Internet privileges—a slap on the wrist—but the disciplinary investigation must have shaken him up, because he’s backed off the attack.
“You get a trial date yet?” West asks.