Harder

by Robin York

  I wouldn’t have wanted to touch it, the way I do now—to reach out and stroke that newborn pink skin with my fingertip.

  I’m dying to know how he would react. If he’d jump or draw away. If he’d pull over and turn off the truck and talk to me. Touch me back.

  “What do you smell like?” I ask.

  He lifts his shirt to his nose to sniff it. I glimpse his belt buckle, and the sight slices clean through the twine I’d used to tie up a tightly packed bundle of conditioned sexual response. My cheeks warm. Pretty much everything below my waist ignites.

  I have to turn away.

  When I glance back his eyes are on me, which only makes it worse, because for a few heavy seconds counted off by my thumping heart, West doesn’t look angry. He looks like he used to when I was prone in his bed and he was crawling up my body after stripping off my panties—like he wants to own me, eat me, pin down my wrists, fill me up, ruin me for any other man.

  I let out a deep, shuddering breath.

  West concentrates his intensity on the road, frowning at it as though it might at any moment sprout a field of dangerous obstacles he has to navigate the truck around.

  The charged silence lengthens. He exhales, slow. “Juniper.”

  It takes me an eternity to remember I’d asked him what he smells like.

  “Is that a tree or a bush?”

  “Both,” he says. “Kind of.”

  He taps the steering wheel with flattened fingers. His left knee jumps, jiggling up and down, and then he adds, “It’s a tree, but most of them are short like a bush. Oregon’s got too many of them. They’re a pest now, crowding other stuff out. The landscaper I work for uses the lumber for decking and edging, but I’ve seen it in cabinets and stuff, too. They make—”

  He stops short. When he glances at me, I catch a strained sort of helplessness in his expression, as though he’s dismayed by how difficult it is to keep himself from talking about juniper trees.

  He swallows. “I was chipping up scrap wood for mulch. That’s why I stink.”

  I wait. His knee is still jittering.

  Come on, I think. Talk to me.

  “They make gin from juniper berries,” he says finally. “Not the Western juniper we have here. The common juniper over in Europe.”

  “Is that sloe gin?”

  “No. Sloe gin is made with blackthorn berries and sugar. You start with gin and pour it over the other stuff and let it sit forever.”

  For the first time since I landed, I feel like smiling. Whatever’s wrong with him, however twisted and broken he is, this guy beside me is West. My West. When it comes to trivia like gin berries and juniper bushes, he can’t help himself. West is a crow about useless information, zooming down to pluck shiny gum wrappers off the ground and carry them back to his nest.

  The girl who took my place—does she listen when he does this? Does it make her like him more?

  If there even is a girl.

  That same intrusive thought I’ve had a hundred times. A thousand.

  Whoever she is, she’s not the one he called last night.

  “I like the smell,” I tell him.

  “When I’m here, I don’t smell it. But when I fly from Putnam to Portland, it’s the first thing I notice getting off the plane.” This time when he glances at me, his eyes don’t give anything away. “It was, I mean. When I used to do that.”

  “I bet when I get back to Iowa, I’ll smell manure.”

  “Only if you time it right.”

  The silence is more comfortable this time, for me at least. West remains edgy, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel.

  “Is this your truck?” I ask.

  “It’s Bo’s. He lets me use it.”

  Bo is West’s mom’s ex. She and Frankie lived with Bo until she left him for West’s dad.

  Bo was at the trailer when West’s dad got shot.

  Sticky subject.

  “Is he still in jail?”

  “No. They questioned him and let him go.”

  “Was he …” I take a deep breath. “Did he really kill your dad?”

  “He won’t say. He was there, shots were fired. There were two guns. I don’t know which one discharged, or if it was both or what. For all I know, it could’ve been suicide.” The anger is back, flattening out his voice so he sounds almost bored.

  “Not likely, though, if they took Bo in for questioning.”

  “What the fuck do you know about what’s likely?”

  “Nothing. Sorry.”

  That’s where the line is, then. Junipers are an acceptable topic of conversation. His dead father is pushing it. Speculation about what’s going to happen next? Out of bounds.

  West leans forward and flips on the radio. The music is loud, hammering hair-band rock.

  I turn it off. “When’s the funeral?”

  “Whenever they get the body back from the coroner.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m not going.”

  “Okay.”

  More silence. Dark green forest closes in on both sides of the road. We’re climbing now, heading into the foothills.

  “How long are you staying?” West asks.

  “As long as you need me to.”

  He stares at me so long, I start to get nervous we’re going to drive off the road. “What?”

  “When’s school start?”

  “The twenty-eighth.”

  “Two weeks.”

  “Two and a half.”

  “You’re not gonna be here two and a half weeks.”

  “Whatever you need.”

  West looks out the driver’s-side window. “You shouldn’t have come.”

  I’ve already thought the same thing, but it hurts to hear him say it. “It’s nice to see you, too, baby.”

  “I didn’t invite you.”

  “How sweet of you to notice, I have lost a little weight.”

  His eyes narrow. “You look scrawny.”

  Stung, I drop the act. “I’ll be sure to put on a few pounds for your visual enjoyment.”

  “If you want to say Fuck you, West, go ahead and say it.”

  “Fuck you, West.”

  His jawline tightens. When he reaches for the radio, I knock his hand away.

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with you,” he says.

  “You’re supposed to let me help.”

  “I don’t want you anywhere near this shit.”

  “That’s sweet, but too bad.”

  That earns me a criminal’s glare. “You don’t belong in Silt.”

  “I guess I’m about to find that out for myself.”

  “I guess you are.”

  He reaches for the stereo again. This time, I let him turn it on.

  I think about how we’re driving toward the Pacific Ocean, which I’ve never seen.

  I think about West and what I want from him. Why I’m here.

  I don’t have any answers. I’m not kidding myself, though. Inside a makeup pouch at the bottom of my suitcase, there’s a leather bracelet with his name on it.

  I shouldn’t be here, but I am.

  I’m not leaving until I know there’s no chance I’ll ever wear that bracelet again.

  The road drops away from the pavement on West’s side of the truck.

  The guardrail doesn’t look like it would be much help if he yanked the wheel to the left and sent us sailing out over the edge.

  Not that he’d do that.

  I don’t think.

  We climb up and up through a corridor of trees, winding around broad curves to the sound of rushing water. The light fades.

  I can’t get over the green. It’s green in Iowa in August, too, but there the color hugs the ground in long rows and flat lawns. Here, it’s all trees. More trees than I’ve ever seen in one place, crowding the road and pulling my gaze up to the sky.

  After a while, we descend, sweeping in slow, easy curves downhill as though we’re skiing on an extravagant scale. This heaved-up wo
rld is our field of moguls, the tires rocking us back and forth like freshly waxed skis on perfect powder.

  I’ve been to the mountains, skiing in Telluride and Aspen with my family, but Oregon is different. The road’s so narrow, the forest so dense. It feels primeval, unfinished.

  We swoop and curve. The silence stretches out and grows stale.

  This drive is interminable.

  West reaches past my knees to open the glove box. Careful not to touch me, he extracts a pack of cigarettes.

  “You’re smoking now?”

  “Hand me the lighter, would you?”

  I can see it—cheap bright pink plastic—but it’s too deep for him to reach. I leave it where it is.

  “Smoking is disgusting.”

  We hit a straight section. He leans over me as far as he has to in order to retrieve the lighter, which is far enough to press his shoulder into my knee.

  The lighter snicks and sparks when he sits up, the smell of the catching tobacco acrid, then sugary. The ripples from our brief moment of contact move through my body, lapping against my skin for a long time.

  West blows smoke in a stream out the window to dissipate in the dark.

  I feel like smoke, my edges dissolving with every mile that passes, every flick of his hand over the wand that makes the high beams come on, a flood of light, then another flick, dimming to yellow. The darkness concentrates his potency, makes him more solid and me less substantial, immaterial, unreal.

  When he leans forward to turn down the radio—an obvious prelude to conversation—I have to pull myself back from somewhere far away.

  “What’s going on with Nate?” he asks.

  “Nothing.”

  “He stopped posting the pictures?”

  “As far as I can tell. They pop up sometimes, but that’s going to happen. I don’t think it’s him doing it anymore.”

  Nate spent most of last school year posting and reposting our sex pictures online while I wasted dozens of hours contacting site owners to get them removed. It was the world’s least fun game of whack-a-mole.

  He finally stopped after I took the problem to the dean’s office. When the college began to investigate, I hoped he would end up expelled for violating the campus technology policy, but it didn’t happen. He’d been too sneaky, and he’s a convincing liar. How else would he have convinced me he was a nice person for all the time we were going out?

  The college let him off the hook with a suspension of his Internet privileges—a slap on the wrist—but the disciplinary investigation must have shaken him up, because he’s backed off the attack.

  “You get a trial date yet?” West asks.

  “No, we’re not done working on the complaint.”

  “What about the Jane Doe thing?”

  Filing as Jane Doe rather than Caroline Piasecki means my highly recognizable name won’t come out in connection with the case, and the public records of the suit won’t identify me.

  Which means, in turn, there’s a chance that my entire economic and political future won’t be tainted by what Nate did and what I’m doing to get back at him.

  “My dad knows someone who knows someone who says with the judge I’m going to be assigned, it shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “So when do they set your trial date?”

  “After we file the complaint, which is any day now,” I say. “Dad says it will probably be at least twelve months until the trial.”

  “It’ll be nice to see that fucker raked over the coals for what he did.”

  “I guess so.”

  “You guess so?”

  “It’s going to cost a fortune.”

  “How much?”

  “Maybe a hundred thousand dollars, according to the lawyer. Could be more.”

  West whistles.

  “And he says it could get ugly, like a rape case. They’ll attack my credibility. So I’m trying to get ready for all that.”

  “Doesn’t sound easy to get ready for. Douchebag lawyers grilling you about your sex life.”

  “Don’t forget my mental stability.”

  “Your mental stability’s just fine.”

  “I meant that they’ll grill me about my mental stability.”

  There’s a smile flirting with the corners of his mouth. “Fucking great. Have ’em call me, I’ll tell ’em what a basket case you were at the bakery last year.”

  “That’d be great, thanks.”

  “My pleasure.”

  I press my hands against my thighs so I won’t press them into the ache in my chest.

  It’s too easy. Talking to him. Remembering.

  If I close my eyes and pretend, it’s almost possible to forget all the bad stuff between us and drop into my memories of those nights at the bakery when I was falling in love with West.

  Maybe he feels it, too, because he leans forward to turn up the music.

  I look out at the dark green shapes of the trees, the blurred branches. The trial drops away as I let myself think about why I’m here. What I want. My purpose.

  West.

  But after a while, even West slips away, and then it’s just dark.

  Cold air coming in from the driver’s side of the truck snaps me awake.

  We’re parked on the street in a neighborhood of nearly identical houses—all of them small, crowded on tiny lots.

  West stands outside the open driver’s-side door. His face through the window is stark, shadowed.

  “Is this where Frankie is?” I ask.

  “Yeah, my grandma’s.”

  He shifts so he’s holding the top of the car door with both hands, leaning into it, studying me through the glass. It’s as though he’s using the door as a shield so he can look at me, really look at me, the way he hasn’t yet.

  He rakes his eyes upward from my shoes. Right turn at my knees. Left turn at my thighs. Lingering over the parts that used to be his favorites.

  It’s like in my dreams—my mind too fuzzy and slow to defend me against the heat of West’s lava-dipped icicle gaze. I just want to crawl across the front seat of the truck on all fours until I crash into his body and he’s on me, over me, hot hands and wet mouths and every single thing I’ve missed that I need.

  A few hours in the truck, and my lofty thoughts of friendship and loyalty are nothing but a sticky layer on top of weeks’ worth of longing.

  West’s expression has gone dark. “You’re staying here tonight,” he says.

  “What, to sleep?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “Out at Bo’s.”

  “How far is that?”

  “Twenty miles.”

  “I want to stay wherever you are.”

  He comes from behind the door and jacks his seat forward, pushing himself all the way through the space behind it so he can get hold of my bag.

  When he starts rolling it up the walk to the front door, I get the idea that this decision he’s made isn’t negotiable.

  I hurry after him. “Who’s inside?”

  “Based on the cars, I’m guessing Grandma, Mom, Frankie, a couple of my aunts.”

  I wasn’t aware he had aunts. Or, until he mentioned her earlier, a living grandmother. “Anything I should know about them?”

  “Except for my mom and Frankie, I haven’t seen them in six years.”

  “Seriously?”

  He frowns. “You think I’m fucking around?”

  I don’t. My stomach hurts. “Sorry. How should—who should I say I am?”

  “Tell them whatever you want.” He rings the doorbell.

  I have time to take a breath and think, This is going to be weird, before the door is pulled open directly into the kitchen.

  The first thing I notice is that there’s a woman sobbing at the table.

  Like, sobbing.

  Two other women and three kids are crowded into the room with her, but I don’t pay much attention to them, because the second thing I notice is that the woman who opened the door
has West’s eyes exactly.

  Nobody has eyes like West’s. Even West doesn’t, since his eyes look one way one day and another way the next, depending on the light and his mood and all kinds of factors I can’t pin down. I’ve wondered what it says on his driver’s license, because there is no word for the color his eyes are.

  It’s trippy, seeing West’s eyes in the wrinkled face of a woman.

  Other than the eyes, the resemblance is scanty. She has to tip her head way back to talk to him, because this woman is short. She’s round in every direction—boobs, hips, butt—with salt-and-pepper hair cut close to her head. She’s takes a drag off a cigarette held in her left hand, and I notice when she puts it to her lips that her fingers seem to take off in a new direction at each swollen knuckle joint.

  “Will wonders never cease?” she says.

  Far from a welcome. I kind of expect her to exhale right in West’s face and then slam the door, but she turns her head to the side instead and says, “Michelle, look who’s here.”

  I know that Michelle is West’s mom. She looks up.

  Her eyes are like dark holes punched into dough.

  “Who’s that?” Her voice is hoarse, terrible to hear. I want to cover my face with my hands.

  “This is Caroline,” West says.

  She blinks. Rubs at her eyes. Blinks again. “Caroline who?”

  Behind a closed door between the kitchen and the other room, a toilet flushes. West asks his grandma, “What’s she on?”

  “She’s been like this all day.”

  “Fuck.” He inhales deeply. “Can we come in?”

  “Introduce us,” his grandmother says.

  “Caroline, this is my grandma, Joan. Grandma, Caroline.” He points across the kitchen. “Aunt Stephanie, Aunt Heather, and my cousins Tyler, Taylor, and … I don’t know that one.”

  “Hailey,” the woman named Heather says.

  “Hailey,” West repeats. “Good to meet you, Hailey. I’m West.”

  I shake West’s grandmother’s hand and offer a weak, “Hi.”

  “I brought her to stay with Frankie,” West says.

  “I’m with Frankie,” Joan replies.

  “You’ve got other stuff on your plate.”

  “I can take care of one kid.”

  The bathroom door opens, and I recognize West’s sister at the same time her face lights up to see him. “West!”