Harder (Caroline and West) Read online

  Later, I’ll call Dr. Tomlinson.

  WILDERNESS

  Caroline

  Every year, winter takes me by surprise.

  Fall comes and shears the edge off summer, mellows out the temperatures for a few golden days of gorgeous perfection, and then when I’m ready to live the rest of my life in those stolen moments, snap.

  It turns cold one night. Just like that.

  Growing up, I’d deny what it meant. No, not yet. It’s not time yet.

  I’d ignore the signs. I’d leave my jack-o’-lantern on the front porch long after Halloween, celebrating a season that had passed until black spots showed on the flesh around the pumpkin’s mouth and it started to look ancient and wizened.

  Once the first frost did it in, my dad would make me take it out back and chuck it into the woods. So long, fall.

  But the autumn of my junior year at Putnam, I was ready for the days to get shorter and the temperatures to drop. I braced myself for the cold, preparing to carry on in a Putnam without West, a life without West.

  It would be cold for a while. Lonely. But I’m an Iowa girl. I was used to the cold. I knew how to bundle up against it, muffle my breath behind a scarf, muffle my needs so I could endure the early nights and the long winter.

  My dad finished annoying the lawyer, and my complaint against Nate got filed in mid-September. Sixty days to respond. Plaintiff identified as Jane Doe.

  The trial date was set for the end of next year. I braced myself for four seasons of waiting and strategizing, subpoenas and scrutiny, depositions and petitions to compel.

  I thought I had it under control.

  Then I got a text from a number I didn’t know. It was West, telling me he was coming back to school.

  Another to say he was bringing Frankie.

  A third to let me know I shouldn’t worry, because he’d keep his distance.

  I think what I was supposed to do when I got those texts was freeze. Snap. Go cold, just like that.

  It would have been easier if I could have locked myself off. Safer to tend my rose garden of ice crystals, pretending to love the cold.

  But I was through with pretending.

  I got those texts, and I felt joy – pure and deep, as real as anything I’d ever had with him. I felt vindicated, because this would be another chance. The future he’d killed off, now brought back to life.

  And maybe our future was an ugly, shambling thing. Maybe it was half-dead, scarred and foul – but it was ours, and I couldn’t pretend I didn’t want it. I couldn’t even pretend not to be elated, burbling through the days after I got the news, wondering when and where I’d see him again, how it would be, how it would feel.

  That sounds stupid. Naive.

  I know how it sounds.

  And I know, too, that a jack-o’-lantern on the front porch is only a jack-o’-lantern until midnight on October 31. One minute after midnight, it becomes a rotting pumpkin. My father used to explain it to me every November.

  But it’s the same pumpkin, right? It’s the pumpkin you bought, carried home, planned over, cut carefully into. It’s the pumpkin you gutted and scraped at, lit up, placed proudly on display.

  It’s the same fucking pumpkin the day after Halloween that it was the day before, and the fall when West came back to Putnam, I was through with people trying to tell me how to feel and what to love.

  When there are pictures of your cunt on the Internet and strangers emailing to tell you they want to jizz in your face – when that’s happened to you and there is a way in which it will never stop happening – you have to get really comfortable with the notion that the only person who’s allowed to define how you feel about anything is you.

  I shared an off-campus house with seven friends and friends of friends, including my best friend, Bridget, and West’s former roommate, Krishna. Bridget and Krishna nagged at me. What happened, what happened? You can talk to us. You should tell us. We need to know.

  Everyone wanted to talk to me about West that September. What happened in Silt. How I felt about it. What I was going to do when he came back to Iowa. Even my friend Quinn, who was studying in Florence that semester, pestered me over email. I heard you went out to see West. I need details.

  Everyone wanted to talk about it, but really they wanted to tell me how to feel.

  It ticked me off that there was so obviously a right and a wrong way to respond to what West had done, and that everyone seemed to think I was doing it wrong – in denial, confused, lost, deflecting.

  Fuck that. I felt how I felt. I wanted what I wanted.

  Outside, the weather turned cold, then colder.

  I saw West everywhere, and I burned.

  I’m driving back to campus when I spot him getting out of his truck at the Kum and Go.

  I check that the oncoming lane is clear, jerk the wheel to the left in a U-turn, and pull up to the curb across the street.

  My hands tremble in my lap as I watch him walk into the store. He’s wearing short sleeves over long sleeves. His shoulders stretch the fabric. I drink him in – that back, that ass, those long legs in boots.

  I get wet just from looking. Greedy. Full of an anxious, amped-up craving for contact.

  I want to talk to him, push into him, hit him, fuck him. Crash into him and find out what happens next. Something. Anything.

  The plate-glass front of the shop is crowded with brightly colored posters and signs, but I can see the top of West’s head at the counter. I lean closer to the windshield. My throat is hot, my breasts full.

  I left Silt six weeks ago. West’s been back in Putnam fifteen days.

  Every time I see him, it gets a little stronger.

  The first time I saw West after he came back, he was outside the art building, and I was walking with Bridget to my seminar. A clutch of smokers gathered by the door, West off to the side by himself, blowing a white cloud into the air.

  He didn’t greet me.

  I knew to expect it. He’d done it to Krishna already. He’s doing it to everyone.

  West works and goes to class and stands off by himself, because that’s how he wants it.

  I spot him out windows, passing by the giant phallic sculpture at the center of our campus.

  I see him in the library at the circulation desk, waiting to be helped.

  I go out for groceries and discover the shape of his head, the curve of his shoulder, as he holds a package of cold ground beef in his hands by the butcher’s counter and studies the label instead of turning around to say hi to me.

  When I close my eyes, there’s his defiant, arrogant face as he opens the door of the truck after he finished eating Mrs. Tomlinson’s pussy. He wipes his mouth, even though he never did that. He tilts up his chin and says, How about that, Caroline? Am I good enough for you now? Still want to rescue me? Still think you can love me? Huh?

  When I sit on the bed in my rented room and look out at the alley behind the house, an apple core three feet from the garbage can, I see West resting his forehead against the steering wheel of Bo’s truck, shuddering by the side of the road.

  None of what I feel is as simple as anger or betrayal or disgust, because there’s always this other thing.

  The thing that makes me do a U-turn when I spot his truck.

  The thing that pulls me out of my car when he emerges from the store with a carton of cigarettes, free arm swinging, keys glinting in the bright light of this sunny September day.

  I can see how angry he is from twenty feet away.

  He can be as angry as he needs to be, and I’ll still feel like this whenever he comes near. I can’t help it.

  He stops when he spots me. I don’t wave or speak or beckon to him. All I do is watch. Witness him.

  You exist. I exist. Here we are.

  He gets in his car and drives off toward campus, and I track his progress until he turns the corner.

  I’m smiling for no reason.

  I just feel so alive.

  Some things can’t be u
nseen once you’ve seen them.

  This is what I’m thinking the next morning, standing stock-still on the threshold of our kitchen, clutching a water bottle in my hand and transfixed by the unexpected sight of Bridget and Krishna making out.

  It’s seven-thirty in the morning. I was, prior to this moment, barely awake.

  Now I am so awake.

  Awake enough to notice a lot of things other than the obvious thing, which is my teeny little freckled redhead best friend tongue-wrestling with the resident campus manwhore.

  Like, I notice that they’re both in their running clothes, and they smell ripe. After two years of rooming with Bridget, who runs track, I’m more than used to the odor of warm armpits and high-tech fabric, but this time it’s coming off both of them together.

  Their mouths are making this wet smacking sort of noise. Krishna is owning Bridget. One-hand-on-the-back-of-her-head, one-right-above-her-ass, bending-her-backward-over-the-counter owning her.

  His hair and shoulders are wet. Her thighs. Their arms.

  Rain. It’s raining out there. The rain is drumming against the house, and Bridget is kind of… squeaking? She’s making a noise that’s so obviously compliant that it makes me think of animals, mating animals – like, hamsters, maybe, which I wish it didn’t because I once actually saw hamsters mating and it isn’t something I want to see again, or think about, and Jesus, neither is this.

  And yet I can’t move.

  I can’t move, because this isn’t a first kiss or a fourth kiss or an eighth kiss. They have done this many, many times. This has been happening.

  When?

  When did this start happening?

  Krishna’s hand is sliding beneath Bridget’s back, rucking up her shirt, his skin so dark against hers, and my brain is just hammering at me, when, when, when? Last school year? Over the summer, when Bridget took more than one long weekend to visit Krishna in Chicago for reasons that now seem flimsy as tissue paper?

  As flimsy as her sports bra, which presents no obvious barrier to Krishna’s hand. It’s working its way around to the front. It’s going to get there, and no. No.

  This is wrong. It’s wrong in the way things are wrong when you don’t expect them, but it’s wrong in other ways, too, that I can’t even get a handle on because they hit me in one big mass, a cumulous cloud of emotions, foggy and cold, impossible to sift through, especially because it keeps happening. His hands are over her breasts now. They’re moving, they’re tweaking, and she likes it. So much.

  I have to clear my throat against the possibility that Bridget’s hamster noises will actually kill me.

  Bridget leaps away from Krishna. Her hand flies to her throat. “You scared me!”

  I lift my water-bottle hand, now frozen into a claw. “I just wanted a drink.”

  This is the worst thing to say, it turns out, because it makes them step farther apart, clearing a corridor to the sink that I have to walk through.

  I have to not-look at Krishna so hard. And not-hear the way they’re breathing. And not-consider how wrong it is that none of us seems to have anything to say at this awkward moment to end all awkward moments.

  Bridget. Krishna. The two talkiest people in a whole universe of talkers, now totally silent.

  The water running into the bottle is louder than any running water has ever been.

  I can feel them looking at each other behind my back. I can feel the conversation they’re not having, the frantic exchange of messages through hands and eyes.

  I turn off the tap. Set my bottle in the sink. Pivot to face them and say, like it’s no big thing, “So this is a surprise.”

  Bridget is the color of beet juice. “It’s not what it looks like,” she says. “Because, you know, it looks like we were going to —”

  “It’s exactly what it looks like,” Krishna interrupts.

  “It’s not,” she insists. “Caroline’s going to think we were sneaking around and we didn’t want her to know, but that’s —”

  “We were sneaking around,” Krishna says. “We didn’t want you to know.”

  Bridget punches him in the arm. “Stop it!”

  “Stop what? Telling the truth?”

  “No! You’re making it sound like we’re – like I’m – and it’s just not…”

  “Not what?”

  “Not like that. Dirty. And sneaky. And… I don’t know. Convenient housemate hookup.”

  Bridget’s expression is searching, earnest in a way that’s painful for me to take in.

  Krishna aims his can’t-give-a-shit grin at her. “Nothing wrong with a dirty, sneaky, convenient housemate hookup.”

  It’s ghastly. She stiffens. The flush drains out of her face.

  She gets smaller.

  Krishna claps her on the shoulder like they’re old army buddies. “I’ll leave you girls to it. I need to grab a shower.”

  We listen to the stairs creak underneath his climbing feet.

  “Oh my God,” I say when he’s traversing the hallway over our heads. “Bridge.”

  She shakes her head. “Don’t make me talk about it.”

  “I kind of think we should talk about it.”

  “Yeah, I know. I just…”

  She covers her face with her hands, and I wrap my arms around her, hoping that’s the right thing. It feels like the right thing, even though I’m having trouble switching gears from my own reactions to caring about hers.

  It gets easier when I realize she’s shivering.

  “How long has this been going on?” I ask.

  “I don’t know if it’s going on.”

  “It looked like it was going on.”

  “It’s complicated. I would have told you, but it’s so complicated, and I could never tell if we were on or off or neither, so I didn’t know what to say. I still don’t know what to say. At all.”

  “Can I say what it looks like?”

  “Ugh. No.”

  “You sure? Sometimes it’s good to hear what it looks like.”

  “It looks like I’m in love with Krishna and he’s just fucking me because I’m around all the time, and he’s going to break my heart and then pretend he doesn’t care because he’s a guy and that’s what guys do, and meanwhile I’ll be moaning about how he has hidden depths and you just don’t understand, but you’ll know better because you think Krishna’s only good to be friends with but not someone you can count on, and you’ve never really been able to like him as much since he let West get arrested, because you’re hopelessly in love with West and you’re always going to take his side in everything forever.”

  Her hair drips on my neck.

  I give her a squeeze.

  “Okay,” I say. “So at least you know what it looks like.”

  “I am fully aware, on every level you can possibly imagine, exactly what it looks like.”

  “And you’re saying it’s not like that?”

  “Unfortunately, no. It is like that. Sometimes.”

  “What’s it like when it’s different?”

  She inhales deeply. Bites her lip and casts her eyes at the ceiling, searching for words. “It’s like falling into…”

  She shakes her head. “It’s like…”

  A chill runs up my spine. I’ve known Bridget for over two years. I’ve never seen her at a loss for words. “Bridge —”

  “I can’t describe it,” she says with a shrug. “But it’s good enough to be worth all this other crap, apparently, which I can’t even tell you the epic amounts of crap I’ve been dealing with. What he just did, walking out of the room like that? That’s nothing compared to what he’s been dishing out every time he gets spooked, which is fucking constantly, and if we weren’t —”

  “Constantly fucking?” I interrupt.

  She hides her face behind her hands. “Yes. God.”

  “Go on.”

  “If we weren’t constantly fucking, I would have so many bad things to say about him.”

  “You can say the bad things and also
fuck him constantly.”

  “I know, but it feels so disloyal. I like him.”

  “You maybe love him?”

  She hides her face against my shoulder. “Don’t say it. It’s too stupid.”

  “I have the market cornered on stupid.”

  When she looks at me again, her eyes are bright with tears, but she’s smiling. “You know what I used to think? It’s awful. You’re going to think I’m awful.”

  “Probably not.”

  “I used to think only stupid people made mistakes. Like, people who were too stupid to know what the right thing to do was, so they did the wrong thing, and I was smart enough to see all that stupidity coming, so I would never be like them. I thought my mom was stupid for not knowing my dad was having an affair, and my dad was stupid for having one. And, God, I’m sorry that I’m saying this, but I thought, after what Nate did —”

  “You thought I was stupid?” I blurt out.

  “Kind of? I mean, not across the board, but about that one thing, yeah. Like, I thought I’d never let a guy do that to me, and I couldn’t see why you had unless you’d just sort of stumbled into a pit of stupidity temporarily, and then stumbled back out.”

  “I can’t believe you thought that.”

  “I know. But what I’m starting to figure out with Krishna…”

  “… is that it’s possible to be smart and still do really stupid things?”

  “And know you’re doing them the whole time,” she says. “That’s the worst part.”

  “It is,” I say, nodding. “I’ve had this exact same thought. Oh my God, I am being so fucking stupid. I should be arrested for containing this much stupidity in one person. And then, like, God, he’s hot, I love him, I am totally going to do this anyway.”

  “It sucks,” she says.

  “Donkey balls.”

  “Ginormous donkey balls.”

  “It sucks ginormous hairy donkey scrotums,” I confirm.

  “Hoovers them up.”

  “Deep-throats them.”

  “While they take pictures and post them on the Internet,” Bridget says.

  “And go down on other women to drive you away.”

  “And tell you about all the women they’ve fucked while they’re taking off your pants.”