Harder (Caroline & West #2)(64)

I expect her to draw farther away from me.

She puts her arms around me instead. Her hot cheek presses against my neck.

“What helps,” she says, “is when I’m looking out the window of the truck and seeing you with her, sometimes I can flip that. So I’m looking in it, at me. Imagining what you were feeling to make you do that. And you know, West, it’s f*cking awful from that direction, too. It hurts. I almost can’t stand it, because it means I have to accept how badly I failed you when you went home to Silt. How badly everyone failed you.”

“I wasn’t your responsibility.”

“You were,” she says. “You were, and you still are. And the good thing is, when I put myself outside the truck, after I do it, I’m not … I’m still mad, but I’m mad at the whole world, you know? I’m just as mad for you as I’m mad at you, and I can kind of see how it will be easier to feel that way next time. That eventually, it’s the only way I’ll feel. That Silt was this awful thing that happened to both of us together, instead of something you did to me.” She kind of laughs. “I mean, I’m not quite there yet. But I’m trying.”

“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “More sorry than you’ll ever know.”

“I know you are,” she says. “I’m sorry, too. But now you’re here.”

“I’m trying to be here. I’m trying so hard.”

She holds me. We stay like that until I can breathe again, and I start to feel more than just guilt and shame.

Until I can feel her warmth and smell her body.

Caroline on my lap. My dick wakes up.

It seems f*cked-up that it’s even possible for me to want her after what we just talked about, but I do. And she wiggles against me, letting me know she wants me, too.

“So tell me something, West,” she says. “What do you want?”

No way Caroline can know I asked Frankie the same thing over pancakes this morning.

No way can she know that nobody ever asks me that. Nobody but her.

She kisses along my jaw. “What do you want, West?” she whispers.

She kisses my eyebrows and my forehead and the tip of my nose. “What do you want?”

I take her chin and guide her mouth to mine. I grab hold of her sweater.

I’m going to show her.

The sweater is long—down below her hips when she’s standing up—and I pull it off over her head because I like the contrast of the waistband of her black leggings against the pale skin of her stomach. Her bare breasts and her soft cotton-covered thighs.

“I thought about you like this in Silt,” I say.

“Oh, yeah?”

“When you were staying at my grandma’s. That time I was over for dinner, sitting by you on the couch, it was all I could f*cking think of—getting just enough of your clothes off to put my mouth on you. Slide my fingers inside you.”

“We were in a room full of people.”

“I know. All day at work, you were texting me, trying to get under my skin, and I was thinking about getting you upstairs alone at Joan’s on those mismatched pieces of carpet. She still have those?”

“Yeah. You had a lot of plans.”

Not plans. Urges. Needs.

Impulses I kept shutting down, because I was so sure I had to.

“At the airport, I saw you before you even came outside,” I confess. “You were fussing with your bag behind the glass, and I wanted you to stay right there so I could watch you. You looked amazing. You looked like …”

Like water in the desert. Like color in a black-and-white movie.

Stupid clichés. She looked like Caroline. Like herself.

I could hardly believe she was real.

“I drove twenty miles over the limit all the way to Eugene,” I say.

She drops her forehead onto mine. “You idiot.”

“I knew as soon as you came through the door, I’d ruin it. There wasn’t any way not to ruin it, and it made me so f*cking angry, so that’s what you ended up seeing when you did come outside. How angry I was at the world for making me and you impossible.”

“We’re not impossible.” She tilts her hips into me. “We’re right here.”

I smooth my hands over her ass. “I should’ve just told you how bad I wanted you. How I wanted you in the truck on the way from the airport. At the funeral home in that family room with the door locked. How I couldn’t stop thinking how you’d bite your wrist if I bent you over the back of the couch. Bite my shoulder if I lifted you up against the inside of the bathroom door.”

Her pupils are huge. “You looked at me sometimes like … but you wouldn’t talk to me.”

“I felt so black. So dark. And it wasn’t right, you know? It was sick to want you like that, to want some quick f*ck when you were trying to help me.”

“Maybe it would have made you feel better.”

“It would have made me feel like complete shit. And that sounded good, too—getting something I wanted that much, then getting punished for it.”

She kisses me. Sinks down onto me, grinds herself against me, licks over my lip, and bites it. “What do you want?” she whispers.

This time it’s a taunt. A tease.

This is all I want. Just this.