Harder (Caroline & West #2)(63)

I get my hands in her hair and kiss her. “I couldn’t.”

She smiles, but it’s the sad kind, the kind that hurts. “You were ten when Frankie was born.”

“Yeah.”

“The same age she is now.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Do you ever think about that—your sister with a baby?”

“Christ. No.”

“But it’s the same, right? If Frankie were in your shoes, if she had a baby brother born and nobody to take care of him but her—”

It gives me chills. “Don’t.”

She runs her hands up and down my arms, warming away the goose bumps. “It’s cruel even to think about, isn’t it? She’s a kid. She’s too young. But so were you.”

“I was old enough.”

“You were always as old as you had to be. That’s the part that breaks my heart.” She resettles herself on my lap, pressing closer. “How old were you when you met the Tomlinsons?”

“Sixteen.”

“How old the first time? With Mrs. Tomlinson?”

I didn’t tell her. She never asked me directly, and I avoided the subject, never wanting her to have to think about me f*cking an older woman, a married woman, a woman I gave what she wanted so she’d give me what I needed.

I f*cked Mrs. Tomlinson because that was what I had to do to get out of Silt.

Caroline knows it.

She’s figured it out. I can see it in her eyes.

“Baby, don’t you think—”

“How old?” she repeats.

I blow out a long exhale. “Sixteen.”

“Did you want her?”

“She was pretty. I wasn’t a virgin.”

“But she was the one who initiated it.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t have …”

I’m forced to stop, the memory choking me hard for a second. How f*cking terrified I was the first time in her car, when she sucked me off in the parking lot of the golf course and I watched out the window for Dr. T to drive up. How scared I was to say no, how furious that I had to say yes.

Furious at how I responded to her when I knew even at sixteen that she couldn’t be right in the head. That what she wanted from me wasn’t sex—it was something else. Some hit of power, of danger.

I was so furious at Dr. T for not knowing about it. For never putting a stop to it. It would’ve ruined my chance at Putnam, but there were times I still wished to f*ck he’d figure it out.

Resting my head against Caroline’s shoulder, I breathe in the scent of her hair. “She was his wife,” I say. “And I already knew he could be my ticket out of there if I played it right.”

“It’s illegal what she did to you.”

“I consented.”

“Sixteen-year-olds can’t consent to sex with adults. You were indebted to her, afraid of her husband and what you would lose if you told her no.”

Something in her tone tells me it’s a question, and she needs the answer. Not for herself, but for me. She needs me to acknowledge that what she’s saying, this story she’s telling—it’s my story.

It is.

But I never saw it that way. I never let myself see it that way. I just thought about it as what I had to do, and I didn’t let myself wonder why Rita Tomlinson wanted to f*ck a minor or what it meant for me that I was the minor she decided to f*ck.

“Yes,” I whisper.

“West?”

I lift my head and say it again. “Yes.”

“If that happened to your sister in six years—”

Rage. Shame. All over me. God, this is why I don’t do this, why I never wanted to do this, because it’s too f*cking awful. “Please don’t.”

“I want to make sure you hear me.”

“I hear you. But don’t go there. Please.”

She strokes her hands over my head, down my neck, across my shoulders, along my arms. My chest. My back. Everywhere she can reach.

She holds me, and it helps. Slows me down. Brings me back into my body.

Even though my life before her isn’t something she can fix, it helps.

“That’s why I don’t want to hear it,” she says. “I don’t want to hear you tell me how worthless you are, or why you’re sorry for what you did to me with that woman. I know what you did and what it meant. I know. And it wasn’t about sex. It was about—God, I don’t even have the word for it. Hopelessness. Despair.”

“I used sex to make you leave me. It was … that was something special between us. Sacred, even. And I turned it into a weapon. Turned it on you.”

“What else did you have to use?” she asks.

It’s like thawing from a freeze. It burns. It takes my breath away, and I have to drop my head again and breathe.

It’s harder than I thought it would be.

Harder still when she says, “It hurt me so bad, West. I don’t want you to think I’m being Mother Teresa here, pretending it didn’t.”

I’m shaking. “Caro.”

“No, I should say this. I should level with you, because it hasn’t stopped hurting. Sometimes I think about it and I can’t stand it, like I really can’t stand it, and I have to do something to get out of my head or I’ll just be so full of hate. So mad at you. I don’t know if I was ever as mad at Nate, even, because what he did was nasty, but what you did was so f*cking personal.”