Harder (Caroline & West #2)(54)

“Get your arms up,” I tell her. “Hold on.”

She scoots back, and I keep moving after her, moving my knees up as she’s coming to a half-reclined position so she can find a grip on the top of the headboard behind her. Then she’s got a hold and I’ve got her, my arms braced and gripping oak, her legs around me and squeezing into my hips, her * clenching, her tits bouncing with every thrust.

I’ve got her moaning under me, got the smell of her, the sounds of her, like nothing else.

Like no other woman I’ve known, nothing I’ve had, no one like Caroline.

I’ve got her, but I can’t stop chasing after her. We f*ck fast and rough, and I don’t know if it’s what she needs, but I can’t do it any other way. If I slow down, stop to savor it, stop to think—I can’t.

There’s no way but this way.

There’s no one in the world but me and her, her pink nipples, her *, her lips and her eyes and her hair, the creaking bed and her bucking hips.

I’m fixated on her white knuckles lined up next to mine, clenching and releasing in rhythm. That’s where I’m looking when she tightens up, and I’m surprised by the sound she makes, the way it breaks over her face.

That’s all it takes to push me over—Caroline coming, the most erotic sight I know. Fluttering hot pleasure rushes through me everywhere, wrings me out, wrecks me for anything but her warm, soft body and my forehead against her temple, my mouth on her cheek, on her shoulder, resting on her neck.

Then we’re breathing.

Our hearts are racing, bodies cooling, the music pounding into the floorboards but its urgency pointless now, because we’re here.

Finally.

Here is where we were going—naked and touching each other everywhere, soft, vulnerable, together.

I’m smiling into her neck, thinking this is the best monumentally stupid thing I’ve ever done while drunk, when I hear another noise out of Caroline that doesn’t sound like laughter.

Sounds like crying.

I don’t move. Not until I feel her hands at my shoulders, pushing me.

Shoving me away.

“Get off, okay?” Her eyes are swimming. She shoves me again. “Please, get off, I can’t …”

“I will, I swear, baby, hold up,” I say, because I’ve got to grab the condom or we’ll have a mess on our hands. When I’ve got it secured, I pull out, sit up.

She turns her back to me.

I can see every bump in her spine.

I wrap the condom in a tissue and throw it into the trash can by her desk, then sit back down next to her and put my hand on her shoulder. “Caroline?”

She shudders. “Don’t.”

“Talk to me, though.”

“I can’t. I don’t—just give me some space, okay?”

It’s not okay, because I don’t know what that means. A few feet, a few minutes?

A few miles? A few months?

She was there for me at the school with Frankie. She stuck by me after what I did in Silt, stuck close to me since I came back to Putnam even though I’ve been standoffish and inconsistent and probably f*cking infuriating.

She was with me just now—wasn’t she with me?

Christ.

I stand up and dress, jeans and socks and shirt. I kneel over my knotted shoelace and spend an eternity unknotting it while Caroline cries.

Something crashes downstairs.

The sound of crashing and sobbing sends me tripping into dark channels of recrimination.

You’ve got nothing to give her, no business being here, no right to touch her, no skills to fix this.

You’re worthless, you’re toxic, you’re poison.

I sit down on the bed.

Her crying is as empty as the sound the shovel made when I sank the blade into the dirt and piled up soil and rocks to dump on my old man’s corpse. The only thing I’d done in months that felt easy, because I knew that he was gone, and I knew I could put him in the ground and be done with him. There was my past, there, six feet deep. I was going to cover it with so much dirt that it could never claw its way out of that hole.

He can never touch me again. That’s what I thought. That’s what I paid for when I paid for the funeral.

But he’s in me. He looked like me, talked like me, probably f*cked like me, because I can remember being five years old and hearing my parents f*cking and my mom crying after.

You don’t ever forget something like that.

And no matter how deep I buried him, there’s no way for me to pretend not to know that my father was the kind of man who’d do what I did to Caroline after the funeral.

I sure as f*ck didn’t enjoy it, but I did it. I closed my eyes and closed a fist way down deep inside myself and bludgeoned my way through it, telling myself I had to because it was the only way. Telling myself I didn’t have a decision to make.

Caroline was right when she read me the riot act in Silt. Everything she said, she was absolutely right. Everything she’s said to me since.

I’m afraid.

I’m so f*cking afraid of making any kind of choice, because ever since Frankie was born I’ve told myself that thinking of me, of what I want, what I need, is a luxury I don’t get to claim. It’s all about Frankie. My life is for Frankie. If I live for her, I don’t have to think about me.

I’ve been making excuses for inexcusable behavior, acting like the Fates snipped my threads so short that I just have to take whatever life shoves down my throat. I just have to breathe through my nose and swallow it and survive so Frankie will never know what that’s like.