Harder

by Robin York

  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 flicking 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 sh
e 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 thing 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.

  He can never touch me again. That’s what I thought. That’s what I paid for when I paid for the funeral.

  But he’s in me. He looked like me, talked like me, probably fucked like me, because I can remember being five years old and hearing my parents fucking and my mom crying after.

  You don’t ever forget something like that.

  And no matter how deep I buried him, there’s no way for me to pretend not to know that my father was the kind of man who’d do what I did to Caroline after the funeral.

  I sure as fuck didn’t enjoy it, but I did it. I closed my eyes and closed a fist way down deep inside myself and bludgeoned my way through it, telling myself I had to because it was the only way. Telling myself I didn’t have a decision to make.

  Caroline was right when she read me the riot act in Silt. Everything she said, she was absolutely right. Everything she’s said to me since.

  I’m afraid.

  I’m so fucking afraid of making any kind of choice, because ever since Frankie was born I’ve told myself that thinking of me, of what I want, what I need, is a luxury I don’t get to claim. It’s all about Frankie. My life is for Frankie. If I live for her, I don’t have to think about me.

  I’ve been making excuses for inexcusable behavior, acting like the Fates snipped my threads so short that I just have to take whatever life shoves down my throat. I just have to breathe through my nose and swallow it and survive so Frankie wil
l never know what that’s like.

  But that’s not living, is it? Survival isn’t life.

  Survival is what you do when you don’t get to choose.

  I’m not going to wake up in the morning in my bed over the garage and pretend to be some kind of a role model for Frankie, some kind of a parent to her, after I left Caroline naked and crying in her bed.

  I survived that man. I won’t turn into him.

  What I’ve got to figure out is how to defy him. How to live a life that’s rich in everything he never had, fulfilling and beautiful like he couldn’t imagine, because he drove all the beauty away from himself.

  And it could be that it’ll always be harder for me than it would for some normal guy, because I started out the way I did. I’m smart, but there’s all this stuff I don’t know.

  I don’t know how to be a father to a kid who’s safe. I don’t know how to be a student just to be a student—how to explore, how to waste paper, how to play. I don’t know how to tell Caroline I’m sorry and make her hear how much I mean it, and I don’t know how to put what I did behind me and look toward the future.

  But I told her I’d try, and I will. Maybe if I try ten times harder than anybody else, that’ll be good enough to get the job done.

  I lie down beside Caroline and put my hand on her shoulder again, stroking up and down her arm.

  I close my eyes, fit my body to hers, and keep touching her, smoothing her, soothing and waiting.

  Whatever she needs. Whatever it takes.

  I’m not walking away again.

  Caroline

  The night of the party.

  The music. The noise.

  Half an inch of foam on top of my beer, floating in its red plastic Solo cup.

  Half of me wanting to leave, go for a drive, go for a run, get away from what was coming for me.

  What was coming for me being West, of course.

  West leaning against a wall, sipping his cup and observing.

  West bending toward some girl, his head cocked, his lips curving into a smile, listening with half his attention even as his eyes roamed the room to find me.

  His gaze like a hand, heavy, stroking.