Harder (Caroline & West #2)(55)

But that’s not living, is it? Survival isn’t life.

Survival is what you do when you don’t get to choose.

I’m not going to wake up in the morning in my bed over the garage and pretend to be some kind of a role model for Frankie, some kind of a parent to her, after I left Caroline naked and crying in her bed.

I survived that man. I won’t turn into him.

What I’ve got to figure out is how to defy him. How to live a life that’s rich in everything he never had, fulfilling and beautiful like he couldn’t imagine, because he drove all the beauty away from himself.

And it could be that it’ll always be harder for me than it would for some normal guy, because I started out the way I did. I’m smart, but there’s all this stuff I don’t know.

I don’t know how to be a father to a kid who’s safe. I don’t know how to be a student just to be a student—how to explore, how to waste paper, how to play. I don’t know how to tell Caroline I’m sorry and make her hear how much I mean it, and I don’t know how to put what I did behind me and look toward the future.

But I told her I’d try, and I will. Maybe if I try ten times harder than anybody else, that’ll be good enough to get the job done.

I lie down beside Caroline and put my hand on her shoulder again, stroking up and down her arm.

I close my eyes, fit my body to hers, and keep touching her, smoothing her, soothing and waiting.

Whatever she needs. Whatever it takes.

I’m not walking away again.





Caroline


The night of the party.

The music. The noise.

Half an inch of foam on top of my beer, floating in its red plastic Solo cup.

Half of me wanting to leave, go for a drive, go for a run, get away from what was coming for me.

What was coming for me being West, of course.

West leaning against a wall, sipping his cup and observing.

West bending toward some girl, his head cocked, his lips curving into a smile, listening with half his attention even as his eyes roamed the room to find me.

His gaze like a hand, heavy, stroking.

The intention in that look. Hot enough to brand me if I stood still and let it sink in, which I did. I wanted him to look.

I wanted him.

The night of the party. The night before the party. The night after the party.

Every night, I wanted to get my hands on him, get my mouth on him, sink my teeth into him, tangle our bodies up, crush our lives together, smash into him and keep doing it. Keep doing it.

Keep doing it because it felt amazing, because I wanted it, because I didn’t know how to stop.

We’d found each other last year, edged closer together, closer and closer until we were so close that I couldn’t imagine my life without him in it.

We got inside of each other, dug in deep and held on, and when we collided on my bed that night, his body hot on top of mine—when I got his skin under my hands—my fingers remembered how to grip him.

My body remembered how to take him in, twine around him, pull at his pistoning hips.

But I cried when it was over because it hurts to surrender to that kind of violent need.

It hurts to see yourself, your defenses down all around you, your wits scattered.

Everything I’d done since he came back to Putnam was in pursuit of that moment. That joy in my body, our two bodies together.

God. That moment hurt.

There was my truth, broken into pieces small enough to read: He’d hurt me. I hurt.

He’d made me angry. I was angry.

He’d driven me away, and I still felt the distance, even with his cock pushing hard inside me, his face in my neck, his tongue in my mouth.

It wasn’t the same. We weren’t. Maybe we could never be the same.

I’d told West there are no beginnings, middles, and ends. Think about it, I told him, because I wanted him to listen to me.

I said to him that life is complicated, people are complicated, because that’s what I believed. That’s what I had to believe. But saying that to West–even if it’s true—didn’t change the fact that he’d written an ending over top of us. Written it with his mouth on another woman’s body.

He pushed inside me, crashed into me, loved me and kissed me and f*cked me until I came hard enough to see stars, only it turns out that seeing the stars when you’re alone in the wilderness doesn’t mean you’ll know how to follow them to safety.

He was my north star once.

That night of the party, I cried because the skies had changed. There were stars scattered across the black night, bright and gorgeous as jewels, but I couldn’t read them.

What I didn’t understand right away—what I figured out that winter, trusting my instincts, trusting myself until I could believe it down deep inside—was I didn’t need to know the way.

The wilderness is life. There’s no way out of it.

That’s not important.

The important thing is that from that night, West was with me.

West was with me all the time.


When I come back to awareness of myself, the quality of the sound from downstairs has changed. It’s not so raucous now, the music slow-moving and trippy, voices conversing, laughing rather than shouting.

The party is winding down.

I cried myself to sleep, or into some kind of stupor.