Harder (20 page)

“I don’t know what to do for her,” I say.

“So you learn.”

“I don’t know how to start.”

“Quit being such a baby. Read a parenting book. Read twenty, if it makes you feel better.”

“It’s not just parenting, though, it’s this stuff.” I gesture at the playground. “Enrichment. Art classes. It never crossed my mind to worry about that.”

“That’s what Jeff’s for.”

“No, that’s my point. I’m saying, we’re living here like we lived in Silt. We’re
surviving
, because that’s all I know how to do. Jeff hears about Clint and the bus and the sick shit that kid said to my sister, and he doesn’t think about punching someone. He tells me,
Yeah, that’s terrible, but we’re gonna handle it. What I’m worried about is how we can make your sister’s life richer
. Richer! What the fucking fuck?”

She’s frowning at me.

“Richer,”
I say again, dropping the word like a hammer. “
Fuller
. More
beautiful
. That’s not surviving, it’s something else. It’s
thriving
. I don’t know how to do that.”

Caroline butts her head into my chest, hard.

Then she does it again.

“What’d I say?”

“West.” She slams her head into me a third time. Rolls her forehead back and forth. “You drive me
crazy
.”

“What?”

“You don’t know how to do it for your sister because you don’t know how to do it for
yourself
, okay? But if you’d just fucking
listen
to me sometimes, and if you’d just
let me in
, you might start to figure it out.”

I’m as shocked as if she’d smacked me—still reeling from her words—when she lifts her face to mine, rises to her toes, and kisses me.

Really
kisses
me, with tongue and teeth, her hands on my head, body pressing into mine.

I don’t even think about resisting. I take her ass in both hands and pull her tight against me, kiss her back, one kiss after another, soft and then hard, a deep stroke of my tongue, scared and confused and glad she’s here, because I know what
richer
and
fuller
and more
beautiful
mean, but only when I’m with Caroline.

She breaks away and kisses my chin, my jaw, my cheek, and my temple. “You’re going to figure it out,” she whispers. “Trust me on this one.”

I can’t trust myself, but I can trust her. “I’ll try.”

She hugs me tight, tucks her head against my neck, and says, “You fucking better.”

I look down at the top of her head, and then I look at my sister again in the car, miles away, thinking whatever it is she’s thinking about.

In between us is Caroline.

Her house is a couple blocks from campus, a big old cedar-shingled place that’s impressive from a distance but looks shabby close up. I park in the alley in the back. Krishna lets me into the kitchen. It smells like onions and garlic—warm cooking scents. Bridget and Caroline are at a little table tucked into the corner of the room.

“Where’s Frankie?” Caroline asks.

“I left her with Laurie and Rikki.”

“Is she okay?”

“Yeah, she just got a better offer. They’re doing some kind
of art-film double feature with popcorn and Junior Mints. She seemed excited, so I said go for it.”

I want to
is what Frankie actually told me. I couldn’t say no to that, especially not when it meant a night off for me and a chance to see if I can remember what it’s like to have friends.

I’m holding a case of beer and a foot-long sausage. I stopped at the Kum and Go on the way here. “Happy birthday,” I say to Krishna. “Legal at last. Must be a thrill.”

“Oh, it is. I almost creamed myself when I woke up this morning and realized I could finally drink with the big kids.”

“I’ll bet.”

“That’s some present,” he says. “You must’ve killed yourself trying to figure out what to get me.”

“I was gonna get you
101 Unsolved Math Problems
, but they were all out at the gas station.”

“It’s a poorly stocked mart, that’s for sure.”

“Figured you’d rather have beer and a giant sausage than a copy of
Hustler
.”

Krishna flicks his eyes at Bridget. “You can put the beer in the fridge,” he says absently. “Open one for me, though.”

“You got it.”

“We picked up two kegs for the party later.”

“Two? You’re not screwing around.”

“You only turn twenty-one once.”

I set the sausage down, twist off two caps, hand him one.

“Grab a chair,” he tells me. “I’m making minestrone.”

“You’re wearing a fucking apron.”

“I know. Trying to look like you, killer. You were always rocking the apron at the bakery last year.”

Nostalgia and disappointment, pleasure and pain.

So many times he came by the bakery just to hang out for an hour before he went home to crash.

So many shifts I spent with Caroline sitting on the floor doing her Latin homework, talking through some idea for a paper or highlighting up her textbook.

Gone now. I haven’t even walked by the bakery. I didn’t ask for my job back because I got myself fucking
arrested
out of the bakery, and I can’t look the owner, Bob, in the eye.

I burned all these bridges behind me when I left Putnam, thinking I was going home when there wasn’t any home for me to go to. Just work and worry and people fucking things up while I tried to be someone they could count on.

And to be that guy, I betrayed what I had with every single person in this kitchen.

I take the chair next to Caroline.

She’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt, just a plain white T-shirt with a pocket on it. Her hair’s down, against her back, still damp from the shower. Her feet, in thick gray socks, are hooked over the rungs of her chair.

She looks amazing to me, even with that tilt to her head and that wrinkle between her eyebrows that means she’s trying to figure me out.

“Check the garlic bread,” Bridget says to Krishna. “The broiler’s tricky, and it can burn if you’re not paying attention. I think it’s been in there long enough—”

Krish talks right over her the way they always do. “I set a timer.”

“—timer is a good idea, but it’s not smart to rely on it completely, because sometimes the broiler is so hot that—”

“It’s fine. The timer’s going, so I’m not checking it.”

“It’s burning, though, I can—”

“It’s not burning.”

“Krish, I can
smell
it burning. You have to—”

By the time he’s found a hot pad, there’s smoke coming from under the broiler, and the whole kitchen smells like
singed bread. Krishna is swearing, throwing doors open, while Bridget flaps around making a lot of noise.

Caroline and I take it all in, unfazed, and I don’t know, it’s nice.

It’s nice sitting next to Caroline, looking at her thighs in her dark blue jeans, her elbow on the table, listening to Bridget and Krish bitch at each other.

He puts the bread in a basket, a fucking
basket
, and sets it in front of me like I’m the king of France. “It’s still going to be a while on the soup. I guess I was supposed to start it sooner and the bread later.”

“You know you were,” Bridget says. “I sent you that text when you were in class to remind you, and I said I could pick up the Parmesan so you didn’t have to waste your time, but you think you know everything—”

“—but really that’s you, right?”

And then Krishna smiles at her in this way that completely betrays him.

I’ve seen him look at her before, but never this obvious. I glance at Caroline, wondering if she sees it, too.

She lifts an eyebrow.
What?

I glance from Bridget to Krishna and back to Bridget. Mouth the word,
Fucking
.

She nods.

“No shit?”

She makes a circle with her left hand, thrusts into it with the index finger of her right, smiling at me with her eyes.

“No shit what?” Krishna wants to know.

“Nothing,” we say in unison, and for a second it’s just like it always was between us. Easy.

I pick up a piece of garlic bread and shove it into my mouth.

I’m fucking ravenous.

Ten more minutes, I tell myself.

I have class tomorrow.

I’ve got work in the afternoon, Frankie to talk to, my whole life to sort out.

Ten more minutes, and then I’ll go.

Dinner did something to me, though. The bread was frozen and burned, the soup so salty it about sucked all the moisture out of my body, and for dessert a cheesecake that Bridget made Krishna from scratch.

It was good. The food and the company, the way I could close my eyes and almost pretend I was an ordinary college guy eating dinner with his friends, drinking a few beers, joking around about big sausages and who’s gonna do the dishes, talking about nothing.

Ten more minutes. Ten more.

Instead, I take my cup back to the keg and draw another beer.

I have just enough to drink to push my guard down, and the music keeps it there—club music, dance music, loud throbbing anthems, and dark catchy songs that make people want to huddle in corners and talk real close together and put their hands on each other.

The house fills with people. I know a lot of them—people I’ve sold to, drank with, handed paper bags of muffins at three in the morning. Old lab partners, group project partners, girls whose names I know because Krishna hooked up with them, girls whose names I know because they’ve tried to hook up with me.

I let it infect me. Noise and heat, girls and sweat. The house gets loud, the music gets louder, everybody’s got a red plastic cup and something to say. Every time someone
raises a hand and shouts “West!” over the crowd—every time someone presses another cup into my hand—I let myself take it.

I’m drinking and talking, laughing with some dude whose name I can’t remember, leaning a palm against the wall, dipping down so I can hear this chick named Sierra who seems to know me though I’d swear I’ve never talked to her before. I’ve got a view down her shirt but her tits are just tits and mostly what I’m doing, even when I’m not doing it, is watching Caroline.

I like the way she looks. The way she laughs.

I like the way she moves when she’s weaving through bodies with her drink held high, the way she jokes around with Krishna and Bridget and her other housemates, the way that even though she’s not all that tall she looks like the tallest girl in the room because she holds herself so straight.

She holds herself like she matters, laughs like she cares, smiles like she’s somebody.

Regal. Caroline’s
regal
. Always has been.

Always will be, and nothing I do or say to her is going to change that, because she wasn’t lying when she said she wouldn’t cut off her hair for me.

She knows who she is deep inside herself. I can break her heart, but I can’t break her pride. I can’t break
her
. She’s not ever going to let that happen.

Fuck, I want her.

All the time, like a virus, a disease I caught, except the other way around—like a cure I caught a year ago, and it’s inside me, winding through my veins, pumping through my heart.

It’s easy to take it.

It’s easy to drink more than I’m supposed to, easy to go to her when I see her resting on the arm of the couch.

It’s easy to walk up behind her and sweep her hair back over her shoulder and lower my head.

I hold her shoulders, bracket her between my palms, tell her
keep still
with my hands, and I open my mouth there, right at the edge of her jawline. It’s the first place I ever put my lips on her, and I know she’ll remember.

I act like she’s still mine, because I’ve never stopped being hers. Not for a second.

I step in closer, bending down, pressing against her as I wrap my arms around her front, feel her breathe, feel like I’m home here, now, with her.

“You having fun?” My mouth is so close to her ear I can whisper. I can tell her anything, sneak explicit words beneath the music—tell her every single dirty act I want to carry out on her body, and no one but Caroline will hear.

“Yeah.”

I feel her breathing, her back rising and falling against my chest, her heat and her excitement.

“We should go somewhere,” I say. “Have some more fun.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

But she’s got her hands on top of mine, and she’s pulling my arms tighter around her.

She’s got her ass against my crotch, and she’s pushing back into where I’m getting hard, making me harder.

This, we always knew how to do.

My hands are at her ribs, crossed around her. I slide them up until they’re just under her breasts. Not quite indecent, but I feel the hitch in her breathing. I know she’s getting wet for me, just thinking what I could do with one sweep of my thumbs. “This feels like a good idea.”

She twists around, heat in her eyes, color in her cheeks. “How much did you drink?”

“Four beers.”

“You’re not wasted.”

“Buzzed is all. What about you?”

“Two beers, and I switched to water a while ago.”

We study each other. Around us there’s movement, shouting and laughter, posturing excitement, but it might as well just be me and Caroline, because I could give a fuck about everything else in the room.