Harder (Caroline & West #2)(88)

I’m going to head home and eat dinner with West and his sister. I’m going to talk to her about why we took her out of school to be here today, what it means for my life and my future, what it means for hers.

What it is to be a woman in this world.

After she goes to sleep, I’m going to lock the bedroom door and strip down to nothing and press every inch of my body against West, my boyfriend, my guy, the love of my life. I’m going to f*ck him, be f*cked by him, slide against him in the glow of the bedside lamp, kiss him and pant in his ear and tell him I love him, I love him, Jesus God I love him.

All of that belongs to me.

Nate can’t take it away.

I hope you’re happy—that’s his accusation.

It turns out that I only have one thing I want to say in response. Two words.

“I am.”



Dude, that is f*cking creepy.

It’s not creepy, it’s evocative.

It makes my balls shrivel up.

That’s not my problem.

No, it is, though. You made it. You made this thing that shrivels my balls, so you’ve got to own it.

Can you stop talking about balls?

Balls are objectively relevant to the conversation.

Ball conversations are exclusionary. Pick a different metaphor.


The art building has long hallways, and at night when it’s mostly deserted, they amplify every sound. I came in the door nearest the library, which means I can hear this whole conversation as I walk the span of the building.

The building is plenty long enough to figure out who’s talking to who. West is the one who keeps referring to his balls. Annie’s the one who doesn’t want to hear it. And Raffe, I discover as I turn into the studio and get a look at what they’re discussing, is the one who’s created the strangest piece of mixed-media art I’ve ever seen.

It’s a metal folding chair tipped over. On the floor, stuck beneath the seat, is a small cloth doll dressed up like an adult man. It has a miniature red wig, a little suit, and shoes.

But rather than a doll’s face, it has a human face, projected onto it with a camera. Moving human features. It’s talking.

“That is f*cking creepy,” I say.

They all three turn. West is already grinning. “See,” he says. “I told you.”

“You made that on purpose?” I ask.

Raffe smiles. If he were wearing overalls, he’d stick his thumbs under the straps and rock back and forth on his heels—he looks that proud. “Yep.”

“Why?”

Annie groans. “Don’t ask him why.”

“But—”

Then West is beside me, dragging me across the room by the elbow. “Never mind Raffe,” he says. “Look at this.”

There’s a smear of something dark on his cheekbone. His T-shirt is spattered with white spots that I would swear weren’t there when he left the apartment this morning. He’s wearing the jeans he wears for art stuff, the denim almost impossible to spot under a layer of paint and slip and grease and I don’t even know what.

Those jeans turn my crank so hard.

So hard. Seriously, he can’t ever be allowed to know. He’ll hold it over me with his knowing smirks and bossy teasing.

To conceal my lust, I only allow myself quick sidelong glances at his thighs, where he’s rubbed every possible art substance off his hands. The marks of all the projects that have engaged him this semester.

There are so many of them. I think if he were anyone but West, I might be worried that all the projects were a sign of some kind of manic disorder, but I know him too well to worry. I know what it means when West sits me down and says, “Close your eyes,” and starts rustling around in one of the cabinets built into the room’s walls.

It means he’s found something he’s excited about.

It means he’s got something he wants to show me.

It means he’s finally figuring out how to let himself try stuff, make mistakes, waste materials, fail.

I’ve never seen him so happy.

He slides his sketchbook across the table in front of me, flipped open to a page about halfway through. “Look at that,” he says.

I see what looks like an exploded diagram of a tree. Trunk, roots, branches, all of them separated out with space between them, floating in the air. It isn’t a picture that makes sense to me, and it makes less sense when West starts piling tree parts and metal rods on the table in front of me.

He’s assembling the pieces, telling me about drill bits and cutting tools and how he tried Lucite but it was too obvious, and then he started thinking about copper pipe, the kind of fittings you use for doing plumbing, and how that would look if he fitted the pieces together that way, and Laurie suggested he look into the kind of piping that chemists use, the old-fashioned systems, because they have a kind of elegance, so he did some research on that …

He talks and talks, the words rushing out of him, and the whole time he’s moving. Shifting from foot to foot, reaching up to fit one piece of pipe onto another, threading fittings together.

I have this thing for the way West moves.

It’s worse than the jeans thing.

Especially worse because he knows about it.

When West is working, and happy, he gets into this physical kind of flow that unhinges the door on my libido and just lets everything out. I watch the muscles beneath his skin bunch and release. I watch his thighs in those jeans, his ass, his shoulders. Mostly, though, I watch his mouth, because I love to see him animated, love it when he’s got this much to say about something that makes him happy.