Harder (Caroline and West) Page 21
West gives me a once-over. I’m wearing jeans and a ratty sweatshirt. I put my hair in a loose ponytail right after I showered this morning and left it there. Some of it’s probably still wet.
“Impossibly glamorous, huh?”
“Shut up. Your sister thinks I’m glamorous.”
“We both do. We can’t help it. You’re the most glamorous creature either of us has ever met.”
I lean forward and shove his shoulder. He catches me under the arms and drags me over his body as he lies down. We end up crossways on the bed, laughing.
When he tries to pull me close enough to kiss, I resist.
“C’mon, princess,” he whispers. “Cheer me up.”
“In thirty seconds, your sister’s going to be all, ‘What are you guys doing in there? Eew! Gross! Knock it off!’”
“I know. We have to hurry up and do something really gross before she notices.”
He tugs again, and I let him kiss me. His mouth is soft, his tongue hot and demanding. It takes about four seconds for me to forget why I’m supposed to be resisting his demands. Four more to get over my grumpiness.
I feel a slackening around my breasts and his hot palms move beneath the bra he’s just unfastened. He cups my breasts, making my nipples ache.
The damp surge of need that follows makes me moan.
When Frankie knocks on the door, I’m far enough gone to be startled. I jump, and West pinches one nipple hard, which makes me hiss.
“Shh,” he says. His other hand tightens on my ass, fingers digging low and deep and dirty, making the ache between my legs worse.
“West?” Frankie calls. “Are you ordering Chinese or not? I’m hungry.”
“She’s evil,” I whisper. I tilt my hips and grind against his erection. He’s so hard. If his sister weren’t here…
But his sister’s always going to be here.
“I know,” he whispers back. “I’m a complete failure as a parent.”
Frankie bangs on the door again. “You better not be doing anything gross in there!”
“Do you want Chinese?” he asks me.
“I’m fine with it.”
“Yeah, but what do you want?”
I smile down at him. Rub myself against his erection. “That.”
Grinning, he asks, “What do you want that you can actually have before Franks goes to bed?”
“To finish my reading.”
“You want me to keep her out of your hair?”
“Nope.”
“You’ll tell me if she is.”
“I’ll tell her if she is. Remember? I deal with Frankie and me. You deal with Frankie and the rest of the world.”
She pounds on the door again. “West? I’m starving.”
“Lay off, will you?” he calls. “We’ll be out in a second.”
“What are you doing in there?”
“Putting away laundry.”
“And I’m the Queen of Sheba.”
He lifts an eyebrow and whispers, “Queen of Sheba? Where does she get this shit?”
“School?”
He takes me by the hips and lifts me off him. “I better order. You want chicken fried rice and an egg roll?”
“Yep. And an orgasm.” He sits up quick and kisses me hard. By the time he’s done, I’m breathless. “Make that two orgasms.”
West flops down on the bed again, raking his hand through his hair. It’s long enough now that it sticks up when he pushes his fingers through it, which means it’s pretty much always sticking up. “You and me both.”
“How many hours until bedtime?”
“Four.”
I look at the clock. “Five, I bet. She hasn’t been to sleep before ten all week.”
He looks at the door.
He looks at my shirt.
Specifically, he looks at my nipples, then rubs his thumb back and forth over one. Back and forth, until I feel as though I’m turning to lava between my thighs.
“You’re killing me,” I whisper.
“No,” he says. “I’m killing me.”
Then I’m on my back again, and he’s over me. “Keep quiet, and I’ll give you that first orgasm right now.”
I’m about to tell him it’s not happening – not with his sister hovering out there – when he pulls my knee up and rocks into me, hard.
Oh. God. It’s so happening.
“If you’re not out in five minutes, I’m going to eat at Rikki and Laurie’s,” Frankie says through the door. “I’ll tell them you starved me. I’ll say you’re locked in the bedroom making dirty noises, and —”
West picks up a book off the nightstand and throws it at the door.
“Hey!” Frankie shouts.
“We’ll be out when we’re done with the laundry,” he says.
“Fine.”
I hear her footsteps retreating down the hall.
“We really should go,” I say, but it’s completely halfhearted. I can’t make myself mean it, because his eyes are blue in this light, dark and intent, and his hand is moving under my shirt.
“In a minute.”
“One minute?”
“Maybe two.”
“You can’t make me come in two minutes.”
“Watch me.”
His thumb finds my nipple again. My eyelids droop. I can’t keep them open – not when he’s touching me like this. Kissing me this way. Not when he’s unsnapping my jeans, lowering the zipper, finding me hot and wet and making me hotter and wetter.
He whispers dirty promises in my ear, licks and sucks me. He finds all my weak spots and exploits them.
“Ninety seconds,” he says after I come. There’s laughter in his voice. “Easy.”
“Don’t call me easy,” I rasp.
I sound so weak and soft, exhausted as though I’ve run a marathon when all I’ve actually done is breathe hard, tighten up against West’s fingers, and bite down on the noise while he makes my body sing.
West chuckles, clasping my wrists in his hands and collapsing on top of me.
We’ve only got thirty seconds left before Frankie’s back at the door, but they’re sweet.
So sweet.
By the time I get off the phone with the senator’s aide, I’m smiling. This is the third time I’ve talked to him this week and the first call when I felt like I was making solid progress.
“How are my toes coming along?” I ask Frankie.
“I’m doing the second clear coat.”
“Sweet.”
She concentrates on the motions of the little black nail-polish brush. I look up at the kitchen ceiling, walking back through the conversation.
I forgot to talk to him about fraud. All those sites that take customers’ money with the promise of wiping their reputations online – someone needs to stop that. I lost a bucketload of West’s money to one of them. And I need to see if —
“Who’s Jane Doe?” Frankie asks.
“Hmm?”
“Who’s Jane Doe?”
It takes a minute for my attention to settle on the question. “It depends. It’s a name the government uses when they don’t know who someone is. Like, if you find a dead body and can’t identify it, if it’s a man, it’s John Doe, and if it’s a woman, you call her Jane Doe. But in legal cases, you use those names for when the victim wants to keep her identity a secret.”
“You told that man on the phone not to use the word victim.”
“I did. I like the word target better. But usually when we talk about crime, we talk about perpetrators and victims.”
Carefully, she brushes polish over my big toe. “So you were a victim, but you don’t want anyone to know?”
“Well, not exactly.”
“But you’re Jane Doe. That’s what West said.”
“For me it’s just a strategy,” I tell her. “It’s a way of keeping the records of the case sealed.”
Frankie puts the brush back into the bottle and twists the cap closed. “I wish I could do that.”
&nb
sp; “Do what?”
“Make it so no one knows about Clint.”
“Is he still bothering you?”
“No, he stays away from me now. He has to. But when Mr. Gorham came to our class to talk about bullying, I think it was kind of like Jane Doe? Because he didn’t use my name or anything, only everyone knew he was talking about me anyway. I wish I could just… I don’t know. Erase what happened. Start over.”
“I know how you feel.” So much of last year, I wanted to erase what happened to me. “But you know,” I say carefully, “when bad stuff like that happens, sometimes it can be good, too. Like, last year, this guy I used to care about, he wanted me to feel like I didn’t matter – like I was a bad person, and I deserved bad things to happen to me. So he did something to embarrass me online. And it worked. I felt awful. But then I figured out that he was wrong about me, and that he was the one who had a problem, not me. And it made me stronger.”
“How?”
“It’s hard to explain. I guess it’s that I don’t think anyone’s ever going to be able to do to me again what that guy did. I’m sure I’ll get hurt other ways, but not that way.”
I don’t realize until after the words are out of my mouth that I’m not just talking about Nate. I’m talking about West, too.
If it weren’t for Nate’s attack, I wouldn’t have been able to deal with what West did to me in Silt. But I can deal with it. Because I’m stronger.
I’m different.
And I’m glad for it.
“You know what I figured out?” I ask. “That only I get to decide what my actions mean. Only I get to choose how I feel about who I am and what I did. I get to define what I’ll accept and what I won’t. And that goes for you, too. You’re in charge of your life.”
She wrinkles her nose. “West is in charge of my life.”
“He’s in charge of keeping you alive and fed and all that, and making sure you have a chance to learn stuff and become a good person. You’re in charge of everything else. And you know, what Clint did, that sucks. It should never have happened. I’m sorry it did happen. But the thing to remember is, he was the one with the problem, not you. You were the one who fought back. Not in the most constructive way possible, I think we can agree…”
She cuts me a glance. Smiles when she sees I’m smiling.
“… but you know you have it in you. You can stand up for yourself and take down the guy who’s threatening you. And that has to feel pretty good, right?”
Frankie nods. “He’s afraid of me now.”
“Awesome. Just so long as you don’t use your mighty fists again, right?”
“Right.” Frankie tilts her head, thinking. “Is the guy who tried to hurt you afraid of you?”
I see it in my head – Nate passing me on my way home from class. Glancing to the side so he doesn’t have to meet my eyes.
“I think he kind of is, actually. But what matters to me even more is that I’m not afraid of him.” I wiggle my toes. “Are these done?”
“Yeah, but you can’t walk around for a while.”
“You want to make some popcorn?”
“Movie style?”
“Is there any other way?”
“No.”
“You’ll have to do the hard work, though,” I say. “Since I can’t move.”
“I know how.”
Frankie skips over to the cabinet to get out the air popper.
Skips.
I wish West could see her. I’ll tell him later tonight, when he gets back from working with Laurie.
I’ll tell him all of this, because it will help remind him that even though she’s struggling, his sister is amazing and resilient.
So am I.
Bridget uses tongs to pick four hard-boiled eggs out of the bowl on the salad bar.
“Can you make some for me?” I ask.
“Sure.” She adds three more eggs. “Are you going to do a sandwich?”
“Maybe just on crackers.”
“Okay. Pick me up some bread, and I’ll get the mayo.”
It’s halfway through December, and we’re in the dining hall, grabbing lunch between classes. This has been our Wednesday thing since freshman year, and even though we’re both off the meal plan, eating most of our meals at the house, we still do Wednesdays.
Or we try to. I missed last Wednesday because I had to go to Iowa City for depositions with my lawyer in the afternoon. Those weren’t too bad, but this morning I had to get up at the ass-crack of dawn and drive to Iowa City again, this time to be deposed by Nate’s legal team.
November belonged to West, although I spent a couple days with my dad at Thanksgiving.
December belongs to the case.
“You want me to get your drinks?” Bridget’s scooping low-fat mayo into a bowl.
“Yeah, maybe two waters and a skim milk?” The dining hall uses these tiny glasses, so you have to take three or four to get enough liquid.
I carry the drinks, bread, crackers, and the bowl of soup I got on the line over to the table by the window where Bridget and I like to sit. She’s already there, mashing up hard-boiled eggs with a fork. There’s a pile of finely diced dill pickle on a plate. I slide into my seat and reach for the celery stalk.
I dice with a butter knife, remembering the first time I saw her make egg salad with ingredients off the salad bar. It was just a few days into first-year orientation. I was so glad, then, to have been assigned to Bridget by the housing gods, because here was a girl with ideas.
Here was a friend who was smart and kind and matched to me in every way that mattered.
She finishes mixing mayonnaise into the bowl of eggs. “I can take that celery.”
I pass her the plate, and she tips the diced celery in, along with the pickle, salt, and pepper.
“How was your lawyer thing?” she asks.
“Horrible.”
“What was it like?”
“They asked me every question fourteen times, and most of the time I wasn’t allowed to answer. When I was, I had to say whatever one thing I’d rehearsed with the lawyer, and then Nate’s lawyer would say something to make it sound like I was a crazy slut.”
“God.”
“I know. But it was exactly the way my dad told me it would be, so I knew what to expect.”
“Does that help?”
“What?”
“Knowing what to expect?”
I shrug, because the cry-pressure is building behind my eyes, and I should be tougher than this. I am tougher than this. “It just turns out that when smart, rich guys in suits spend hours asking you questions designed to make you feel like a crazy slut, it’s really hard not to start feeling like a crazy slut.”
“You’re not a crazy slut. We don’t even believe in sluts.”
“I know. But it’s still hard. It’s, like, superhuman difficult.”
“Did you cry?”
“In the car on the way home.”
“But not in front of the lawyers?”
“No, but only because we took two breaks so I could pull myself together.”
“Can’t you get out of doing this?”
“Only if we withdraw the suit.”
“But you’re not thinking about that.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m thinking about it.”
I haven’t let myself think about it.
But I keep hearing what Frankie asked me. So you were a victim, but you don’t want anyone to know?
It feels wrong.
I’ve always believed I could do whatever I put my mind to, but if I want to get into law school with my sex pictures on the Internet – if I want to get through law school and out the other side, to practice and advocate for social justice, to run for office and become a legislator and change the world for the better – what do I have to do to make that happen?
My dad says this is what I have to do. Push through the suit. Wear the Jane Doe straitjacket.
I’m not so sure anymore.
I have to swallow, because my throat hurts. I wonder if I’m coming down with something.
“Caroline?” Bridget reaches across the table to cover my hand with hers. “Why are you doing this when it makes you so unhappy?”
I swallow again.
My throat aches, and my eyes fill with tears.
I don’t have an answer.
I wake up in the dark. The clock reads 2:48 a.m.
West is plastered against me, and he’s way too hot. The air in his bedroom is dry from the space heater running in the corner. I have one nostril that’s completely blocked, and the other is so desiccated I can only inhale a thin stream of overwarm oxygen.
There’s no way I’m getting back to sleep.
When I try to wiggle out from under his arm, it tightens for a second. “Where you going?” His voice is husky with sleep.
“Just out to the living room.”
“You need me to rub your head?”
It’s my favorite way to fall asleep – West’s fingers rubbing circles over my scalp. “Maybe later. I have to pee anyway.”
“Come back soon.”
“I will.”
After I visit the bathroom, I stop in the kitchen for a glass of water, then pad out to the sofa. I wrap myself in the ratty afghan on the couch and sit in the dark.
Untethered, my mind wanders.
I pluck at the holes in the ratty old blanket, which I suspect West’s grandma must have knit in the 90s. It’s got the color palette – maroon and forest green.
In the bedroom, I hear West turn over, rustling the covers.
I think about the depositions. How terrible they made me feel.
I curl into a ball under the blanket and close my eyes.
A spring creaks.
Seconds later, a telltale floorboard groans, and then I hear water running in the bathroom.
By the time he comes into view, I’m sitting up again.
He’s got nothing but boxers on, which seems crazy for December, but West’s internal furnace runs hotter than mine.
He scratches his stomach. “Scoot over.”
When I do, he sits down sideways and positions me between his outstretched legs.
“Pillow.”
I hand him one. He sticks it behind his head, wraps me in his arms, and leans back, pulling me down with him, my body wedged between the couch and his skin, my head resting in the nook beneath his shoulder.