Harder (Caroline & West #2)(58)

What he wants to do. What I want to let him give me.

That’s all this is.

I put my hand over the top of his head, rake my nails over his scalp and give him one hard, firm push.

“Easy there, tiger,” he says. “We’re taking it slow, remember?”

This time when he smiles, it’s his real smile. I know, because it hits me down low and deep, makes me shudder, makes me wetter than I already was.

“So slow, Caro. You’re gonna hate me for it.”

I don’t, though.

He tortures me, asks me every now and then, “You happy?”

I keep saying yes even though he’s killing me.

Yes, yes, West, God.

He kills me and kills me.

I’m so happy, I could die.





West


Can I talk to you?

That’s what I asked Caroline in her room, in her bed.

Can I talk to you? I asked Frankie the next morning over pancakes.

I called her counselor and set up another meeting. Can I talk to you?

I left my boss at the window plant a message, asking him to call me back, giving notice that I’d be quitting as soon as I found work with daylight hours.

I don’t think I’d ever talked so much in my life as I talked that November.

You get your mind made up that you know how everything is and so there’s no point in talking. You know what you’ve got to do. You know what the future looks like.

And then you hit some pivot point, some paradigm shift that shows you everything you thought you knew wasn’t right, so you start going around all the time saying, Can we talk? I have to ask you something. I’ve got things I need to tell you.

I guess it’s because I’m stubborn—because I get set in my ways, pulling the cart through the same ruts day after day—but I always thought when I asked people to talk to me that I knew how the conversation would go. What I’d say. What they’d say back.

It’s funny, because I was always wrong.

Those weeks in November and on into December—they were full of surprises. Happy surprises, sad surprises, gutting surprises, frustrating surprises, amazing surprises.

Caroline was sometimes the biggest surprise of all, because she kept coming around. Staying over. Sticking by me. And those were the weeks that everything finally changed.

I stopped thinking I knew how my life was going to go.

I started waking up in the morning thinking how interesting it would be to see what happened next.

And somewhere along the way, I noticed I wasn’t asking, Can I talk to you? anymore. I was just talking.

Listening.

Getting surprised, and liking it.


The morning after Krishna’s party, Frankie’s picking at her pancakes, and I’m trying not to care.

She drenched them in syrup. I warned her it was too much, suggested she could put the syrup in a cup and dip the pieces so she’d have the right amount, but she just rolled her eyes like I was the stupidest person on the planet and kept squirting the syrup on.

She ate four bites. Now she’s poking at what’s left. Lifting the edges up with her fork. Dropping them with a heavy, wet splat.

Her hair’s a rat’s nest at the crown of her head, and she’s wearing a nightgown with Tinkerbell on it that pulls too tight across her chest. A kid’s nightgown on a teenager’s body.

I need to get her new pajamas.

I push my chair back and stand, thinking I’ll do the dishes. That way, I don’t have to get annoyed at her for wrecking the breakfast I made.

“What are we doing today?” she asks.

The plan is to sort through our shit. Have a heart-to-heart and work it all out.

Frankie isn’t aware of the plan yet.

I sit back down.

She’s eased one elbow onto the glass top of the table and dropped her head so the pancakes are exactly at eye level. I watch as she lifts up the whole stack of pancakes and drops it down. Splat.

“You’re gonna get syrup in your eyeballs doing that.”

She glances over to check if I’m serious.

“I thought we’d just hang out at home,” I say. “If it’s okay with you.”

“All day?”

“Sure, why not?”

“You’re always making me do stuff on the weekends.”

“I thought you liked doing stuff.”

“Not all the time.”

“We don’t do stuff all the time.”

“Every weekend.”

“You don’t want to do stuff with me?”

She shrugs. Forks up her pancakes four or five inches. Splat.

“Was it fun over with Rikki and Laurie?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

“What movies did you guys watch?”

“I don’t know what they were called.”

“What were they about?”

“There was one with these boys whose dad took them to an island and they killed him by accident.”

“For real?”

“No, it was just a movie.”

Her tone of voice says I could not possibly be more of a moron.

“Was it R-rated?”

“How should I know? It was from Russia. There were subtitles so you could understand what they were saying.”