Harder (Caroline & West #2)(57)

I don’t want to hear any of it.

“Tell me if I was wrong,” I say. “What I said in the truck on the way to the airport. Which part did I get wrong?”

He shakes his head. Says something against my hand that I can’t understand.

I take my palm away.

“No part,” he repeats. “You were right. You’re always right.”

“I’m not, though. I’m guessing all the time, and I screw up. Don’t put me on a pedestal.”

“You’re always right about the stuff that matters.”

When he smoothes his hand over my forehead, pushing away a strand of hair that stuck to my temple, I take his wrist and pull it down until his palm is pressing flat over my heart.

I leave it there. Let him feel it beat.

I’m alive. I guess that’s what I’m showing him.

I don’t want to spend my life staring backward at everything that’s gone wrong. I want to be here.

So I pull him down by the back of his neck until his mouth is on mine and he’s kissing me again with his hand over my heart. He’s kissing me deeper, moving over me, stroking my tongue with his, letting me feel the heat and the strength in him.

There are things I want to say, blanks in the conversation that the good girl who still lives in me insists I’ve got to fill up.

She wants to tell him, I forgive you.

She wants to say, I still love you.

She wants to press her hand over his heart, too, and make him swear never to leave. Never to f*ck up like that again.

But I’m not her anymore. I’m not sure if I do forgive him.

I know I love him, but I don’t want him to have those words. I want him to earn them back.

Convince me, I think, as my blanket falls away. As West’s thigh moves between mine, his belt dragging over my hip, his hands so sure of themselves, so good at gliding down my back to my ass, at grabbing and lifting and positioning me just so.

“We’re gonna go slower this time,” he says, kissing over my collarbone. “So much slower it might just kill me.”

“Make sure it’s not so slow that I don’t notice it’s happening.”

He grins. It’s almost right. Almost West’s smile. But he’s holding something back.

“Tell me.” I put my fingertip at that worry line between his eyebrows that won’t quite go away.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he says. “I like this. I want this. But shouldn’t we be talking?”

My hands are sneaking up his back, his smooth tan skin, every bit of him familiar but different, broader, stronger, harder. “We are talking,” I say.

Because we are. What he means is that we’re not following a script.

Only, there is no script. There are no rules for this.

I don’t think we’re doing it wrong, because I don’t believe there’s any way to do it wrong or any way to do it right outside of how I feel, how he feels, how we feel between us.

All the songs are love songs. That’s what I’m learning.

All the songs are love songs, and this one is ours.

“Are you happy?” I ask. “Right now, this instant?”

He kisses the top of my shoulder. My biceps muscle. “You’re naked.”

“Does that mean yes?”

“That means f*ck yes.”

“Me, too.”

He kisses the swell of my breast. Cups them both in his hands and drops his head to my cleavage. His back rises under my palms.

“Are you smelling my boobs?”

“I’m smelling you.”

“That’s a little weird.”

“Okay.” He roots his nose in there until it touches my breastbone. Kisses that spot. “I can live with weird.”

He kisses my ribs, licks down my ribcage, mouths my stomach, smells me at my navel and then between my legs. Looks up with his hands already dug under my ass, his mouth an inch from the stripe of my pubic hair, and says, “You still happy?”

He sounds like he’s teasing, but I know what he’s asking. All the guidebooks and conventional wisdom in the world say this is where I should snap.

This is the moment when I should be angry, disgusted, cold with him.

I should want vengeance.

I should rain down my vengeance upon him, and the last thing I should ever let him do is what he’s about to do right now.

But I’m swollen and aching and I need him.

When I squirm, he smiles and licks a hot line right through the middle of me.

I’m not sure I believe in vengeance.

I know I don’t believe in tit-for-tat, this-but-not-that, you-can-until-I-say-you-can’t, I-love-you-until-I-decide-I-don’t.

With West, I picked deep and then deeper. I picked all the way, hot and cold, good and bad, dark and light.

I picked West in my bed and West on his fire escape in the snow, chicken-soup West and bakery West, drug dealer West and brawler West, West in Silt and West in Putnam. I picked hand jobs and blow jobs and doggy style and missionary and sloppy oral and morning-breath kisses and nights when we’re too tired and we just hold hands and go to sleep.

I picked him. Him.

This is where we are now. Who we are right now. Us.

I don’t know how I’ll feel in the morning. I’m not pretending it’s all going to be perfect, that it’s perfect now, or even that perfect is a real thing that exists in the world. But tonight, there’s no bullshit between the two of us. There’s just his hand sliding up my thigh. His mouth moving down, his breath on my clit.