Harder (2 page)

When the plane landed in Minneapolis, I had three texts and a voice mail from him, all of them variations on the theme of
Turn your ass around and go home.

I waited until I was boarding for Portland to text him again.
I’ll get a rental car.

Walking off the jet bridge, I got his reply.
I’ll pick you up.

Since that was the outcome I’d been angling for, I said,
Okay
.

It doesn’t feel okay, though. Not even close.

West wears cargo shorts and a red polo with a landscaping company’s logo. He’s tan—a deep, even, golden brown—and he smells strongly of something I don’t recognize, fresh and resinous as the inside of our cedar closet after my dad sanded it down. “Did you come from work?” I ask.

“Yeah. I had to take off early.”

“Sorry. You should’ve let me rent a car.”

West reaches out his hand. For an instant I think he’s going to pull me into his body, and something like a collision
happens inside my torso—half of me slamming on the brakes, the other half flying forward to crash into my restraint.

His fingers knock mine off the handle of my suitcase, and the next thing I know he’s heading for the truck with it.

I stand frozen, gawping at him.

Get your act together, Caroline. You can’t freak out every time he moves in your direction
.

He opens the passenger-side door to stow my bag in the back of the cab. The truck is huge, the front right side violently crumpled. I hope he wasn’t driving when that happened.

By the time he emerges, I’m comparing the musculature of his back to what his shoulders felt like under my hands the last time I saw him. The shape of his calves is the same. He’s West, and he’s not-West.

He steps aside to let me in. I have to climb up to the seat. The sweltering cab smells of stale tobacco. I leave my sweater on. Even though I’m too hot, I feel weird about any form of disrobing.

I turn to grab the door handle and discover him still there, blocking me with his body.

That’s when I figure it out. It’s not his hair or his tan or his muscles that make him seem different: it’s his eyes. His expression is civil, but his eyes look like he wants to rip the world open and tear out its entrails.

“You need to eat?” he asks.

I don’t think the simmering cynical hatred I hear in his voice is directed at me. I’m pretty sure it’s directed at
everything
. But it sends a shiver of apprehension through me, because I’ve never heard West sound like that before.

“No, I’m good. I had dinner in Portland.”

“It’s almost three hours back to Silt.”

“I’m good,” I repeat.

He’s staring at me. I press my lips together to keep from apologizing.
Sorry I came when you called me. Sorry I needed a ride from the airport. Sorry I’m here, sorry you don’t love me anymore, sorry your abusive asshole dad is dead
.

My own father didn’t want me to come. At all. I had to quit my job a few weeks early and hand over almost everything I’d earned as a dental receptionist this summer to pay for the plane ticket—a move Dad called “boneheaded.”

He doesn’t trust West, and worse, he doesn’t trust
me
when it comes to West. Which means we argue whenever the subject comes up. We fought like cats and dogs at breakfast this morning when Dad realized he wasn’t going to be able to talk me out of this.

To make matters worse, we’re close to being ready to file the petition in my civil suit against Nate, my ex-boyfriend, for infringing my privacy and inflicting emotional distress. Dad wants me close at hand so we can read through the complaint together four thousand more times.

He’s a judge by profession, a single parent of three daughters, and a fretful micromanager by nature. Which makes him, in this situation, kind of unbearable.

I reminded him that poring endlessly over documents is what he paid our lawyer a zillion-dollar retainer for, but Dad says this is a learning experience for me. If I want to be a lawyer myself, I ought to pay attention.

I
am
paying attention.

I’m trying, at least. It got hard to pay attention right around the time West told me he was seeing someone else.

When he called me last night, all other thoughts flew out of my head.

The upcoming trial is important. Keeping my employment
commitments is important. But West is
more
important. I’m not going to abandon him when he needs me.

“You don’t have to make a big fuss,” I say. “I’m just here to help.”

Without another word, he slams the door and gets behind the wheel, and we’re on our way.

I thought Eugene was a city, but after we leave the airport we’re instantly in the middle of nowhere, and that’s where we stay. It’s so green, it makes me thirsty.

West turns right, heading toward the mountains.

It’s nearly seven, so we won’t get to Silt until ten. I don’t know where I’m staying tonight.

I’m going to be sitting in this truck with West in the dark.

I take off my sweater. West fiddles with the air conditioner, reaches across me to redirect a vent, and suddenly it’s blasting in my face. My sweat-clammy skin goes cold, goose bumps and instantaneous hard nipples.

He turns the fan down.

“You’re doing landscaping?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

“Do you like it?”

The look he gives me reminds me of my sister Janelle’s cat. Janelle used to squirt it between the eyes with a water gun to keep it from jumping on her countertops, and it would glare back at her with exactly that expression of incredulous disdain.

“Sorry,” I say.

Then I try to count up how many times I’ve apologized since I walked out of the airport.

Too many. I’m letting him get to me when I promised myself on the plane I wouldn’t let
anything
get to me. This is a convoluted situation. Someone’s dead, guns are involved,
West was torn up enough to call me—my job is to be unflappable. I’m not going to get mad at him or act heartbroken. I’m not going to moon around or cry or throw myself on him in a fit of lust. I’ll just be here, on his side.

I’ll do that because I promised him I would when he left Iowa. I made him swear to call me, and I told him he could count on me to be his friend.

He called. Here I am.

After marinating in tobacco-scented silence for a while, I find myself scanning West all over again, looking for similarities instead of differences. His ears are still too small. The scar hasn’t vanished from his eyebrow, and the other one tilts up same as always. His mouth is the same.

Always, for me, it was his mouth.

The scent coming off him is like a hot day in the deep woods—like a fresh-cut Christmas tree—but it’s not quite either of those. On the seat between us, there’s a pair of work gloves he must have tossed there. I want to pick them up, put them on, wiggle my fingers around. Instead, I look at his thigh. His faded shorts, speckled with minuscule pieces of clinging bark. His kneecap.

I look at his arm from the curve of his shoulder to the banded edge of his sleeve where the polo shirt cuts across his biceps. He doesn’t have a tan line. He must work with his shirt off, and the thought is more than I know what to do with.

The last time I saw him, we were kissing at the airport, holding each other, saying goodbye. Even though I know everything’s different now, it doesn’t entirely
feel
different. It’s cruel that it’s possible for him to have told me what he did and for me to still be sitting here, soaking him up.

I’m not over him. I’ve tried to reason myself into it, but I’m learning reason doesn’t have anything to do with love,
and West has always made me softer than I wanted to be, weaker than was good for me.

Before we crashed and burned, though, I liked the person I was with him. He made me vulnerable, but he helped me be stronger, too.

“You want to fill me in on what’s going on?” I ask.

A muscle ticks in his jaw. “I’ve been at work. I don’t know what’s going on.”

“What was happening when you went to work?”

“My dad was dead.”

“Where’s Frankie?”

Last I heard, his sister and his mom were living with his dad at the trailer park where West grew up. West had dropped out of college and moved home to Oregon so he could protect them, but there’s only so much you can do to save someone who doesn’t want to be saved.

His mom wouldn’t leave his dad, and West wouldn’t go near the trailer with his dad living in it. That meant West wasn’t seeing Frankie as often as he would have liked. It bothered him not being able to get close enough to protect her the way he wanted to.

“She’s out at my grandma’s,” he says. “I have to pick her up.”

“Does she seem okay?”

“I can’t tell.”

“She wasn’t there, was she? When he got …”

“Mom says she was at a sleepover.”

His knuckles are white on the steering wheel. I watch the color drain from his skin all the way to the base of each finger as he squeezes tighter.

“You don’t believe her?”

“I’m not sure.”

Then we’re quiet. He’s got a cut on his right hand in the
space between his thumb and his index finger. The skin is half scabbed over, pink and puffy around the edges with curls of dry skin. I can see two places where it’s cracked.

A burn. Or a bad scrape.

Back in Putnam, I’d have known where he got a cut like that. I’d have nagged him to put a Band-Aid on it or at least spread some lotion around so it would heal better. I probably would have made a disgusted face and told him to cover it up.

I wouldn’t have wanted to touch it, the way I do now—to reach out and stroke that newborn pink skin with my fingertip.

I’m dying to know how he would react. If he’d jump or draw away. If he’d pull over and turn off the truck and talk to me. Touch me back.

“What do you smell like?” I ask.

He lifts his shirt to his nose to sniff it. I glimpse his belt buckle, and the sight slices clean through the twine I’d used to tie up a tightly packed bundle of conditioned sexual response. My cheeks warm. Pretty much everything below my waist ignites.

I have to turn away.

When I glance back his eyes are on me, which only makes it worse, because for a few heavy seconds counted off by my thumping heart, West doesn’t look angry. He looks like he used to when I was prone in his bed and he was crawling up my body after stripping off my panties—like he wants to own me, eat me, pin down my wrists, fill me up, ruin me for any other man.

I let out a deep, shuddering breath.

West concentrates his intensity on the road, frowning at it as though it might at any moment sprout a field of dangerous obstacles he has to navigate the truck around.

The charged silence lengthens. He exhales, slow. “Juniper.”

It takes me an eternity to remember I’d asked him what he smells like.

“Is that a tree or a bush?”

“Both,” he says. “Kind of.”

He taps the steering wheel with flattened fingers. His left knee jumps, jiggling up and down, and then he adds, “It’s a tree, but most of them are short like a bush. Oregon’s got too many of them. They’re a pest now, crowding other stuff out. The landscaper I work for uses the lumber for decking and edging, but I’ve seen it in cabinets and stuff, too. They make—”

He stops short. When he glances at me, I catch a strained sort of helplessness in his expression, as though he’s dismayed by how difficult it is to keep himself from talking about juniper trees.

He swallows. “I was chipping up scrap wood for mulch. That’s why I stink.”

I wait. His knee is still jittering.

Come on
, I think.
Talk to me
.

“They make gin from juniper berries,” he says finally. “Not the Western juniper we have here. The common juniper over in Europe.”

“Is that sloe gin?”

“No. Sloe gin is made with blackthorn berries and sugar. You start with gin and pour it over the other stuff and let it sit forever.”

For the first time since I landed, I feel like smiling. Whatever’s wrong with him, however twisted and broken he is, this guy beside me is West.
My
West. When it comes to trivia like gin berries and juniper bushes, he can’t help himself.
West is a crow about useless information, zooming down to pluck shiny gum wrappers off the ground and carry them back to his nest.

The girl who took my place—does she listen when he does this? Does it make her like him more?

If there even is a girl
.

That same intrusive thought I’ve had a hundred times. A thousand.

Whoever she is, she’s not the one he called last night
.

“I like the smell,” I tell him.

“When I’m here, I don’t smell it. But when I fly from Putnam to Portland, it’s the first thing I notice getting off the plane.” This time when he glances at me, his eyes don’t give anything away. “It was, I mean. When I used to do that.”

“I bet when I get back to Iowa, I’ll smell manure.”

“Only if you time it right.”

The silence is more comfortable this time, for me at least. West remains edgy, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel.

“Is this your truck?” I ask.

“It’s Bo’s. He lets me use it.”

Bo is West’s mom’s ex. She and Frankie lived with Bo until she left him for West’s dad.

Bo was at the trailer when West’s dad got shot.

Sticky subject.

“Is he still in jail?”

“No. They questioned him and let him go.”

“Was he …” I take a deep breath. “Did he really kill your dad?”

“He won’t say. He was there, shots were fired. There were two guns. I don’t know which one discharged, or if it was both or what. For all I know, it could’ve been suicide.” The
anger is back, flattening out his voice so he sounds almost bored.

“Not likely, though, if they took Bo in for questioning.”

“What the fuck do you know about what’s likely?”

“Nothing. Sorry.”

That’s where the line is, then. Junipers are an acceptable topic of conversation. His dead father is pushing it. Speculation about what’s going to happen next? Out of bounds.