Harder (Caroline and West) Read online

  “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.

  She’s sober, and I’m close enough. We both know what we’re doing. If this happens, it’s because we’re deciding to let it happen, right now, unimpaired – except I’m never unimpaired around her.

  I’ve been drunk on her since the day we met.

  “Come upstairs with me,” she says.

  “You sure?”

  “I’m not sure about anything.” She wets her lips, the tip of her tongue flickin
g out, mesmerizing me. “But yeah,” she says. “Come upstairs.”

  I let go of her so she can stand up.

  I grab her hips because I can’t help it. I need to grip her. I need to hold her and bite her, lick her and take her, everything I can get from her tonight, all of it, I’m going to store it up, hoard it away.

  She covers my hand with hers. Interlaces our fingers together.

  She pulls me toward the stairs, up the risers, down the hall to her room.

  The framed Putnam Women’s Rugby jersey on the wall above Caroline’s bed vibrates with the thump of the bass.

  I stand in the middle of the rug, not sure where she wants me. I’m in the calm space at the center of a tornado. If I move too far in any direction, it’ll fling me out, fling me away from her.

  When she takes a step toward me, I grab her at the waist and pull her in.

  I get her right up against me, get my hands in all that hair, and I kiss her as if I’d never stopped. As if we can start right up again, right now, and pretend everything in the middle never happened.

  She tastes like she always did. Hot and eager, wet and sinuous. Amazing.

  Amazing is all I can think as I’m filling my hands with Caroline, breathing her in, licking over her lip and giving her my tongue, taking every eager pant like it belongs to me.

  I strum my thumbs over her nipples, the beat of the music inside me, the vibrating bass in my balls, driving intrusive seeking urgency in my dick, in my hands on her ass, my knee between her legs pushing her back to the bed, knocking her down.

  I’m going too fast, too eager, but she’s keeping up with me, lifting her hips into my hard cock with her legs spread, biting the tendon in my neck and sucking at me like she needs it this way, too. Fast and hard and important.

  God, it feels as important as breathing, the way the pressure builds when you’re holding your breath underwater, your eyes closed, that urgency for air pounding away at you until you can’t take it anymore, you just have to.

  I have to.

  We have to.

  She gets her hands under my shirt and rakes her nails down my back. Grabs my ass so hard I feel the bite of her nails on my taint.

  I keep kissing her. It’s not a seduction, it’s an invasion, an attack, clashing swords, clanging shields, both of us desperate to get at each other, get inside the other, get there.

  “Take this off,” she demands, and I sit up and whip off my shirt, grab hers by two fistfuls of cotton from the bottom and pull and pull until it’s gone.

  Her bra is white and lacy.

  Her bra is sailing across the room to hit the locked door with a soft tap, and I’m sucking half of her breast into my mouth and flicking my tongue over the tip while I massage the other and she’s gasping my name. “West. Jesus. Don’t you think —”

  I’m not interested in thinking. I kiss the words off of her mouth, push them aside, reach down and jerk at the laces of my boots and somehow miraculously manage to get them untied on one side while I start kissing her again.

  The other side gets knotted up.

  Whatever. I’m not fucking stopping over boots. She had slip-on shoes that she’s already slipped off, so I go up on my knees and work at her button and zipper, shoving her jeans and panties down before she can say anything, because I’m afraid she’ll see reason and make me stop.

  I get my hand between her thighs, my fingers in where she’s slick and hot and soft, swollen, and I’m a safecracker working at Caroline’s pussy. I know everything she likes, know it like I know how to spell my own name, so I spell my name all over her cunt, working two fingers inside her, my thumb pressing on her clit, not too much, just the way she likes.

  Her cheeks are blazing pink, her eyes closed, forehead wrinkled up like she’s going to cry, and she says my name on a sob, “West.”

  “Don’t stop me,” I’m pleading, and she says, “No, no,” which is exactly what I’ve been afraid of, although part of me recognizes the sanity of it.

  I mean, this is stupid. I know it’s stupid.

  This could ruin everything, ruin it worse than it’s already ruined, and until tonight I didn’t know there was anywhere we could end up that was worse than where we already were, but there is.

  There’s this. This one thing I haven’t fucked up yet.

  My hand stills.

  My head drops to her neck, and she slaps my shoulder so hard.

  “No, West, I meant don’t stop. Don’t, don’t.” She’s fucking herself onto my fingers, lifting and pushing at me, slapping the flat of my shoulder like I’m a balky horse and she wants me to get a move on. “Please.”

  I never could say no to her.

  “You have condoms?” I ask.

  “In my desk.”

  “Can you hold on while I get one? I don’t want you to die on me.”

  Now she’s laughing, patting my shoulder where it’s got to be red, she hit me so hard. “Hurry.”

  I’m already up and moving, yanking at the boot laces I’ve managed to tangle up so bad, but there’s no hope for them so I just pull the fucking thing until it comes off, nearly dislocating my ankle in the process.

  I take off my socks, and I can feel the music in my bare feet.

  The condom’s where she said, where I keep mine in my own desk at the apartment, and it strikes me in the chest like it means something, but I don’t stop to think about what that might be. I sit down on the edge of the bed, condom in hand, looking at her spread out on top of the covers like every fantasy I ever had.

  I jerk myself a few times because it hurts and I can’t not.

  She sits up, replaces my hand with hers, pulls on me fast and tight so that I lose whatever I had left of a brain and turn into an animal.

  “Lie down,” I tell her, and it’s an order, my voice so low, so violent I barely recognize it. She doesn’t object. She seems to know what it means, which is just that I want her so bad I can’t talk or think or do anything but roll that condom on fast, get my hands under her ass, push inside her and yank her onto me at the same time, graceless and fast, hard enough to shut her mouth with a snap of teeth.

  “Get your arms up,” I tell her. “Hold on.”

  She scoots back, and I keep moving after her, moving my knees up as she’s coming to a half-reclined position so she can find a grip on the top of the headboard behind her. Then she’s got a hold and I’ve got her, my arms braced and gripping oak, her legs around me and squeezing into my hips, her pussy clenching, her tits bouncing with every thrust.

  I’ve got her moaning under me, got the smell of her, the sounds of her, like nothing else.

  Like no other woman I’ve known, nothing I’ve had, no one like Caroline.

  I’ve got her, but I can’t stop chasing after her. We fuck fast and rough, and I don’t know if it’s what she needs, but I can’t do it any other way. If I slow down, stop to savor it, stop to think – I can’t.

  There’s no way but this way.

  There’s no one in the world but me and her, her pink nipples, her pussy, her lips and her eyes and her hair, the creaking bed and her bucking hips.

  I’m fixated on her white knuckles lined up next to mine, clenching and releasing in rhythm. That’s where I’m looking when she tightens up, and I’m surprised by the sound she makes, the way it breaks over her face.

  That’s all it takes to push me over – Caroline coming, the most erotic sight I know. Fluttering hot pleasure rushes through me everywhere, wrings me out, wrecks me for anything but her warm, soft body and my forehead against her temple, my mouth on her cheek, on her shoulder, resting on her neck.

  Then we’re breathing.

  Our hearts are racing, bodies cooling, the music pounding into the floorboards but its urgency pointless now, because we’re here.

  Finally.

  Here is where we were going – naked and touching each other everywhere, soft, vulnerable, together.

  I’m smiling into her neck, thinking this is the best monumentally stupid t
hing I’ve ever done while drunk, when I hear another noise out of Caroline that doesn’t sound like laughter.

  Sounds like crying.

  I don’t move. Not until I feel her hands at my shoulders, pushing me.

  Shoving me away.

  “Get off, okay?” Her eyes are swimming. She shoves me again. “Please, get off, I can’t…”

  “I will, I swear, baby, hold up,” I say, because I’ve got to grab the condom or we’ll have a mess on our hands. When I’ve got it secured, I pull out, sit up.

  She turns her back to me.

  I can see every bump in her spine.

  I wrap the condom in a tissue and throw it into the trash can by her desk, then sit back down next to her and put my hand on her shoulder. “Caroline?”

  She shudders. “Don’t.”

  “Talk to me, though.”

  “I can’t. I don’t – just give me some space, okay?”

  It’s not okay, because I don’t know what that means. A few feet, a few minutes?

  A few miles? A few months?

  She was there for me at the school with Frankie. She stuck by me after what I did in Silt, stuck close to me since I came back to Putnam even though I’ve been standoffish and inconsistent and probably fucking infuriating.

  She was with me just now – wasn’t she with me?

  Christ.

  I stand up and dress, jeans and socks and shirt. I kneel over my knotted shoelace and spend an eternity unknotting it while Caroline cries.

  Something crashes downstairs.

  The sound of crashing and sobbing sends me tripping into dark channels of recrimination.

  You’ve got nothing to give her, no business being here, no right to touch her, no skills to fix this.

  You’re worthless, you’re toxic, you’re poison.

  I sit down on the bed.

  Her crying is as empty as the sound the shovel made when I sank the blade into the dirt and piled up soil and rocks to dump on my old man’s corpse. The only thing I’d done in months that felt easy, because I knew that he was gone, and I knew I could put him in the ground and be done with him. There was my past, there, six feet deep. I was going to cover it with so much dirt that it could never claw its way out of that hole.