Harder (Caroline and West) Page 22

  He feels good.

  He smells good.

  It’s so good being with West.

  I wish I could explain to my dad – to anyone who thinks I don’t belong with this man – how I feel in moments like this one. Moments when the rightness of the two of us expands inside me, pushing out against the walls of my chest until what I’m experiencing is so much more than I can put in words.

  Gratitude. Satisfaction. Contentment.

  I don’t know how to say it. There isn’t any way. There’s just this big, blissful feeling that I want to spend the rest of my life in.

  West kisses the top of my head. “Pull that blanket up, would you?”

  I raise it to cover my shoulders and his stomach, and then from underneath I tuck it in along his side, pushing a few inches of blanket beneath his thigh, his stomach, his upper arm. I like to fuss over him, but not too much. Just a little bit, where he might not notice and get spoiled.

  “Sorry I woke you up,” I say.

  “S’okay. What’s going on in your brain?”

  “Too much, apparently.”

  “Yep.” He shifts his shoulders, settling us deeper into the couch. “Tell me.”

  “I talked to Paul again today,” I say.

  “Remind me who’s Paul?”

  “The senator’s aide.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “So, I don’t know. I was just thinking about it. Not about him, but more about what it’s like when I’m talking to him. I feel like… like there are things I can tell him that no one else is going to. Things he doesn’t get – doesn’t understand properly – but I can change his mind.”

  “About revenge porn?”

  “For starters, yeah. I think it’s getting so I could change almost anyone’s mind on that, if I had a clear shot at it. If they aren’t, you know, a prejudiced jerk or whatever.”

  “I bet you could.”

  “And this is going to sound dumb, but I feel a little bit like I was born to do that.”

  His reaction is an exhale across the top of my head – a huff of pleasure and amusement. “Maybe you were.”

  I twist so I can see his face. “Maybe I was, West.”

  His eyes hold mine, steady and calm. There’s no mocking in them.

  He runs his hand up and down my back beneath my T-shirt. His palm is warm on my bare skin, but his eyes are warmer. So sure of me.

  “He wants me to talk to the media,” I confess.

  “Who, the aide?”

  “I guess the senator. They think their best shot at getting this passed is to start with a public education phase, and they want to set up interviews with major newspapers and some of the morning shows on local news in Des Moines and Iowa City, the Quad Cities… They want to put a face on revenge porn in Iowa.”

  “Your face.”

  “My face.”

  “Makes sense to me. You’ve got a beautiful face.”

  “My dad would shit a brick if I said yes.”

  “Yep.”

  “But I was thinking…”

  “You were thinking you were gonna say yes.”

  I smile a little. I can’t help it – it’s nice to be known. I love that he knows me.

  “I want to. What’s the point of suing Nate, spending all this money trying to destroy Nate, if it means I can’t do any of the other stuff I want to do? There’s no point, right?”

  “Right.”

  He squeezes me tighter. We lie there like that for a while, just breathing. West’s hand warms the base of my spine.

  “What do you want, baby?” he asks.

  “Right now?”

  “No. Down the road. Ten years, twenty years… what do you want?”

  I hitch my leg up over his stomach and snuggle closer until I’ve got my face in his neck. I tell his throat, his pulse, “I want to be president.”

  His heart beats, steady and strong. I can feel him, alive against my lips.

  “I’ve never said that out loud before,” I admit. “Not since I was a little girl and Janelle told me women don’t get to be president, and that even if they did, I would never be the president because just how special did I think I was anyway? And she was right. I get it, how impossible it is. Even then, I got it. So I stopped saying it out loud, and I kind of stopped letting myself think that far ahead. I just think about, you know, law school, getting a job after, working my way into local office.”

  “But that’s not where you want to end up.”

  “No, I want to end up in the White House. And I know I don’t have a great shot at it, because nobody does. No woman does. And even if every other star in the universe lined up for me, with what happened last year, it’s probably impossible. The way the world is —”

  “Caro,” he says.

  “Yeah.”

  “Stop telling me why you can’t have what you want.”

  My cheeks are hot. I’m breathing fast, just from admitting such a deep, foolish hope to him. From trusting him with that. “There are a lot of reasons why I can’t have it.”

  “Well, yeah. But if you want Pennsylvania Avenue, baby, you should go for it.”

  “You think?”

  “Fuck yeah, I think. You’re smart and strong and gorgeous and talented. You’re a leader – I always believed that. You need to do your leader thing, and that means you take what happened to you last year and you use it to change the world. Beat people over the head with it if you have to. Talk and talk until the world’s got to listen. And then if you want to be president, what you have on your record is what happened to you and what you did about it. Nothing to be ashamed of.”

  His words wash over me like warm water. They wipe me clean, leave me pure and righteous. Because what he said – that’s just exactly what I want to do. Just exactly how I want my future to be.

  “It’s so big,” I say. “It scares me.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with being scared. Being scared keeps you sharp. And anyway, you can break it down to one ballot at a time. You’ve got my vote.”

  “That’s good. Only 126 million to go.”

  “I have faith in you.”

  I wriggle up and kiss his jaw. “You’re sweet.”

  He takes my cheek in his hand and traps me with his eyes. He’s so solemn. I can see how much he wants me to hear him when he says, “I’m not doing you a favor, Caro.”

  My heart is full and my lungs feel bound up tight with love and gratitude, fear and promise.

  “I’m glad you told me,” he says.

  “I am, too.”

  I am, because now I know what comes next, and it doesn’t seem to matter that it will be hard. It’s just the thing I’ve got to do.

  “I have to settle the lawsuit,” I say. “It makes me feel like shit, and it sucks up all this time and resources. I don’t think there’s any point to it. When I go home for Christmas, I’m going to tell my dad.”

  He smooths his hands over my hair. “Okay.”

  “And I’m going to call Paul back and tell him I’ll do the media stuff. Maybe I can do an interview for the school paper and the paper in town. I could write some pieces for online, too. Salon, or HuffPo? I’ll have to look around at where I might be able to do a personal essay kind of thing. Or else —”

  He pushes on the back of my head, brings me down to his mouth, and kisses the words off my lips.

  “What was that for?” I ask.

  “You were getting loud. I don’t want you to wake Franks up.”

  “I wasn’t getting —”

  He kisses me again, and he does it so well that I’m smiling when I stop to breathe. “Liar.”

  “Not to you,” he says.

  “You just wanted to kiss me.”

  That makes him smile. “Got me there.”

  This time, it’s me who kisses him. My excitement becomes our excitement, the kiss sinuous and liberating, like running fast and falling down in the grass and looking up at the spinning sky.

  I want to tell him more. Tell him
everything I ever hoped for. All the ways I’ve let my ambition be taken from me, yanked from my fingers like so many papers flung onto the floor, scattered around my feet.

  Sooner or later, I’ll tell him everything.

  He lifts me and carries me down the hall to our room. The blanket falls to the floor when he locks the door, but I’m not cold. Not with his body over me, his eyes on mine, his words inside me. You’ve got my vote.

  I think, fleetingly, that the reason I don’t need vengeance is that I have love.

  Vengeance doesn’t give you anything. It doesn’t fill you up or soothe you, satisfy you or change you.

  And even if it did, I don’t need that, because my heart is already full. West’s hands are on my ass, his lips on my neck, at my throat, on my collarbones, moving down. He’s teasing me, smiling and calling me “Madam President,” pulling my shirt off over my head and licking his way down my chest.

  “President Piasecki,” he says to my breastbone. “That’s got a nice ring to it.”

  I close my eyes.

  I’m twenty years old. I have a year and a half of college left. I’m supposed to be drinking too much, partying too much, playing rugby, studying abroad and sleeping around and figuring out what I want to do with my life.

  I’m not supposed to know, already, that I want to spend the rest of my life with him.

  But I do know that.

  I know a lot of things.

  “President Leavitt’s got a nice ring to it, too,” I say.

  His eyes come up, a question in them. “You’re not talking about me.”

  “President Caroline Leavitt,” I say slowly.

  I watch him get it. Understanding shows up on his mouth first – always his mouth – and creeps upward, over his cheekbones, into his eyes. A surprised happiness he couldn’t hide from me if he tried.

  He doesn’t try. He just grins and glides his hand down my stomach, right past the waistband of my pajama pants and into the wet heat of me, making me gasp.

  “You’d make a hot first lady,” I say, before he scatters what’s left of my marbles.

  “Bite your lip, baby.”

  I do. As he works his fingers inside me, I bite it hard enough that in the morning it’ll be swollen, but that’s fine. That little twinge of pain – that taste of blood – only heightens the pleasure.

  He makes me come with his hand, and then he moves inside me and makes love to me so slow, so quiet, for so long that I feel another orgasm begin to build. That dragging sweaty sweetness swelling between us. When it’s rising up, starting to sharpen, he draws me to my knees and pushes inside me from behind.

  He pulls my hair off my neck and whispers in my ear, “I’m going to fuck you like this in the Oval Office.”

  Swear to God. West.

  Head in my hands, my ass in the air, I’m trying not to laugh when he makes me come again, and this time he goes over the edge with me.

  I drop with my face into the pillow, heavy and exhausted, drowsy. He’s so hot and heavy and all over me, his sweaty, familiar weight, the scents of our bodies. Nothing can touch us.

  I’ve never lost sight of my happiness.

  Not for one minute.

  THE BEGINNING

  West

  It snowed a ton that December.

  The first week of Putnam’s winter break was supposed to be Frankie’s last week of school, but it dumped so much on Putnam County that all the schools were closed.

  Caroline had planned to spend the few days before Christmas with her dad, but she ended up stuck at our place.

  The temperature hovered around thirty degrees. The garage roof creaked and groaned under the weight of the snow.

  We ate grilled cheese with tomato soup and watched Christmas movies.

  When we were starting to get restless, Laurie and Rikki loaned us a thousand-piece puzzle of the earth made up of hundreds of tiny pictures, and we spread it out on the coffee table and worked on it together for most of the morning and the early afternoon of Christmas Eve.

  After a while, Caroline and Frankie wandered off. Frankie borrowed my art pencils and fussed with a drawing she wanted to give Mom for Christmas. Caroline sat on the couch researching media opportunities on her laptop, gearing up to become Iowa’s revenge porn poster girl once the holidays were over.

  I stayed with the puzzle, identifying one piece after another. Matching them to their neighbors by color, shape, content, and slotting them into place.

  Piece by piece, the satisfaction built until I’d finished the whole thing.

  I looked at what I’d made and realized I’d spent the entire day absorbed in a metaphor.

  The puzzle was the future – formless, confusing. A thousand tiny decisions I’d have to make. A thousand things to figure out without anything much to guide me but some idea of where I wanted to end up.

  That night, with snow blanketing the fields and the roof of Laurie and Rikki’s house – with snow on the roads and over the stair rail and blown up into the corners of every window – we made a huge bowl of popcorn and watched The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. I sat between Frankie and Caroline, my arms spread behind them on the couch, my feet up on the coffee table, lights winking on the little artificial Christmas tree that Frankie and I had picked up at Walmart.

  After my sister went to bed, Caroline helped me put the presents out, and we turned off the overhead lights and soaked up the glow of the tree, watching the snow fall.

  We didn’t say anything.

  We didn’t have to say anything. We were here.

  And as for what came next – it would be like the puzzle. Complicated, but I could take it one piece at a time.

  Even though I came from a fucked-up family in a fucked-up place, and even though I’d been through a lot of fucked-up shit that didn’t teach me the right things to live a normal life, I had clear eyes, curiosity, and perseverance.

  I had Caroline with me.

  The future would slot into place one piece at a time.

  “No, I know.”

  It’s lunchtime on Christmas Day.

  Caroline is pacing from the front door of the apartment to the back of the kitchen. She’s got her dad on a headset, her hands sunk into the back pockets of her jeans. She’s wearing a dark green sweater with a drapey neck that looks soft and open and inviting.

  She means it to be festive, and it is, but it’s so fucking sexy, too. There’s a shadow under her collarbone where I’d love to put my mouth.

  “Yeah, I know,” she tells her dad. “Sorry not to be there. I wanted to. If it clears up in an hour or two, I’ll see if I can make it tonight.”

  I must be frowning, because when she passes and catches sight of me, she lifts her eyebrows and her shoulders at once, like, What do you want me to tell him? It’s Christmas.

  “I-80’s gonna be too slippery,” I say.

  “It might be,” she tells her dad, who must have said the exact same thing I did. “I’ll keep an eye on the weather and —”

  She pauses.

  Then, “Yeah. If you think that’s the best way to handle it, all right.”

  “Handle what?” Frankie asks. She’s sitting at the kitchen table, drawing in her new sketchbook with the pencils I gave her for Christmas.

  “Don’t eavesdrop,” I tell her. “It’s bad manners.”

  “You are.”

  “True.”

  She rolls her eyes. “Hypocrite.”

  She’s learning all these big words from the gifted-and-talented teacher. She’s been reading a ton, too – the teacher hooked her up with a librarian at the Putnam Public Library who saves out books just for her. Frankie is blowing through a book every day or two. She doesn’t want to talk to me about them, but Jeff Gorham tells me it’s good for her.

  Enriching.

  “He’s going to reschedule the family Christmas dinner,” Caroline tells us both. “Since they’re not sure when I’ll be able to get there.”

  Frankie gives me a pointed glance and sticks out
her tongue.

  A moment later, Caroline’s saying, “I need to talk to you about that, actually,” as she walks down the hall toward the bedroom.

  She closes the door behind her.

  “What’s she need to talk to him about?” Frankie asks.

  “None of your business, Little Miss Nosy.”

  “You don’t even know, I bet.”

  I’m pretty sure I do, though.

  More sure when Caroline’s end of the conversation gets loud enough for me to register that she’s angry, though I can’t quite make out the words through the door.

  Then I can make them out just fine.

  “For the fifth time, I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. I’ve already made a decision, and I’m not going to just wait and see how I feel in a few days. I already know how I feel. That’s why I’m informing you of my feelings.”

  “Stay here,” I say to Frankie.

  I find Caroline sprawled on the bed, hands and legs flung wide, scowling at the ceiling. “No,” she says. “No! I don’t accept that. I knew you’d say it, and I hear where you’re coming from, but I don’t accept it.”

  I sit down on the bed, prop my back against the headboard, and extend my legs over top of hers.

  She reaches out to find my hand.

  The conversation takes a nasty turn, and every time she raises her voice, she squeezes my hand tighter.

  “Not listening to me.”

  “No, Dad, I hear you, but no.”

  “Damn it, Dad, it’s got nothing to do with him!”

  She doesn’t say anything too ugly to take back, but she’s upset enough that her voice cracks, and I can tell she’s not getting anywhere with her old man.

  Eventually, they start cooling down. I’ve never heard anyone argue loud enough to be audible through a closed door and then, ten minutes later, work back around to, “Merry Christmas, Daddy… I love you, too.”

  Caroline hangs up and shifts onto her side. I lie beside her. She turns her face into the bedspread, letting her hair conceal her expression.

  “Are you crying?” I ask.

  She sniffles. “No.”