Harder

by Robin York

  West’s eyes under that sky were all fire and ice.

  His hands were cold when they moved beneath my jacket over warm skin, and I would shriek, but I loved the shock of it.

  The shock of having him. Keeping him.

  How that could become normal–how it could fall into a rhythm of busy days and familiar nights, but still surprise me into gratitude over and over again.

  February was projects and papers, phone calls and television interviews. It was waking up early to drive to the Quad Cities for hair and makeup so I could film something for the morning news. Seeing my name in the Des Moines Register, sitting in a hotel conference room and answering questions for eight state senators, none of whom implied I was a slut.

  All of whom shook my hand and thanked me for my service to the citizens of Iowa.

  February was reading about nonprofits, political action groups, and campus organizations. Talking to activists. Thinking about guest speakers.

  Planning for a future with no walls on any horizon.

  February was Frankie making friends with a girl named Nadine and bringing her home to play once, then a second time, then as many nights as the two of them could get away with it.

  It was Quinn back from Florence and me making time to see all her pictures and hear about her Italian escapades.

  It was me making time for Bridget, too, to listen to how things were going with Krishna and give her advice she didn’t need because actually, it turned out, things were going pretty well.

  It was the beginning of art therapy for Frankie, her nightmares easing up, my insomnia getting a little bit less intense.

  February was West at the studio or out in Laurie’s shop. West talking about Raffe and Annie, West telling me what he was making, what he would try next, what he’d failed at but he had an idea, he had another idea, he had a new idea.

  I gained ten pounds in February.

  Then it was March, and it rained so much that the world turned brown and squelching. The snow melted away. The rug inside the front door developed a crust of mud. We had to leave our shoes on garbage bags to keep flakes of dirt from falling off us everywhere we walked.

  Spring break marked a year since West left Putnam for Oregon. We gave Frankie over to the Collinses and drove to Iowa City for dinner, just the two of us. Appetizers and main courses and dessert over a flickering candle, plates passed back and forth across the table, more to talk about than we could ever say.

  I laughed a lot at that dinner, because my life was so full it spilled over. West pulled me close in the truck, kissed me with the rain pounding onto the roof and the windows until I was breathless and laughing all over again.

  And then there were crocuses.

  April brought sunshine, the world drying out, the first questing blades of grass pushing through the earth. Rugby practices to plan. A rally to organize. Every day, some contact to be made, some reporter to talk to, some new thing to pursue.

  This was how it would be. It was how we would be, always.

  This full of change. This full of life.

  Spilling over into words and laughter, cold hands and hot mouths, and the sound of rain drumming down.

  The lawyer’s office is cold.

  Outdoors, the temperature is exactly perfect. Sixty-four degrees and sunny, which is unheard of for April in Iowa, so that all anyone wants to chitchat about is Gulf currents and global warming.

  At Putnam, it’s one of those afternoons when the entirety of the winter-pale student body emerges blinking from their dorm rooms and spreads out blankets on the lawn of the quad. Boys strip off their shirts and toss Frisbees. Girls hold their textbooks, their chem notes—whatever props they require—when really they’re out there to watch the flesh parade.

  I’m sitting at a conference table with the lawyer and my dad on one side of me, West and Frankie on the other. Across the gleaming cherrywood surface, Nate is flanked by his lawyer and both of his parents.

  This isn’t how it’s normally done. My father made that abundantly clear.

  It’s not normal to insist on signing the papers in front of the person you’ve accused.

  It’s not normal to bring your boyfriend with you, or to invite along a girl too young to fully understand what it is she’s being asked to witness.

  Settlements don’t usually take fifteen weeks to negotiate, either, I told my dad, but I let you have your way. Give me this.

  The document is nothing. I don’t know why I expected a sheaf of pages, binder-clipped together, covered in tape flags, when I’ve been part of hammering out every single one of these terms.

  I guess we expect the turning points in our lives to be plastered in flags and warning signs when, in fact, most of the time our lives change when we’re not paying attention. We blow past the markers without even seeing them, and then we come to the end of some path and find there’s no label for it at all.

  No guardrail. No dead-end sign.

  Just six pages and fifteen paragraphs, with a blank line at the end where I sign my name.

  “Initial here,” the lawyer says, so I do that, and I watch him shove the sheets across the table to Nate.

  The man holding a pen across from me isn’t anyone I know. I broke up with him before the start of our sophomore year. Now we’re coming up on the end of junior year, and we’ve slipped past estranged to the other side of it.

  We’re strangers.

  His father slides the pages from under his hand to read them through before Nate can sign, leaving Nate with his hand wrapped around a pen and nothing to do while he waits in the cold and embarrassed silence of the conference room.

  Nothing to look at but me.

  We stare at each other.

  He’s a young man with sandy hair, blond at the tips, and a scruffy not-quite beard framing padded cheeks and bright blue eyes. He wears a dress shirt and tie. Slacks.

  He wears his privilege in his clothes and his sour expression, as though he’s been asked here for no reason, harassed to the limits of his tolerance, and now this.

  This requirement that he look me in the eye.

  This distasteful performance I’ve staged.

  When his father puts the sheets down in front of him, Nate signs on the last page, initials where he’s told to, and shoves the document across the table toward me.

  “I hope you’re happy,” he says.

  And there is this moment when any number of things could happen.

  West could leap across the table and deck him.

  I could ask to be left alone with Nate and take one last opportunity to give him a piece of my mind before the settlement kicks in and I’m legally obliged to avoid contact with him forever.

  I thought I would do that. Fantasized about it.

  I imagined what I would tell him, what words would sink right into the heart of him and make him see what he’d done, why it’s wrong, why it devastated me.

  I had a whole speech.

  But this isn’t my life here in this conference room that’s cold as a tomb. Everyone is dressed for a funeral because this is the end of something—the final act of a drama that’s been difficult and hurtful, complicated and rich.

  A drama that’s taught me more about myself than anything I went through in the years preceding it.

  What Nate did to me will never go away. I will never stop being angry, because it will never stop rearing up to hurt me. He lashed out at me, attacked me with the weapons at his disposal, and changed the contours of who I am forever.

  He changed my future.

  He made everything harder.

  But God. Here I am with West and Frankie and my dad—these people I love more than anything. And after I walk out of this room, I’m going to get into West’s car and roll down the window and stick my hand out to feel the spring air sliding through my fingers.

  We’re going to drive down the interstate at seventy miles an hour, and all of this will slip away.

  Back in Putnam, I’ll change into shorts and find
a blanket, drive over to campus, plant myself on the lawn, and pretend to study while I watch the boys playing Frisbee with their shirts off.

  I’m going to head home and eat dinner with West and his sister. I’m going to talk to her about why we took her out of school to be here today, what it means for my life and my future, what it means for hers.

  What it is to be a woman in this world.

  After she goes to sleep, I’m going to lock the bedroom door and strip down to nothing and press every inch of my body against West, my boyfriend, my guy, the love of my life. I’m going to fuck him, be fucked by him, slide against him in the glow of the bedside lamp, kiss him and pant in his ear and tell him I love him, I love him, Jesus God I love him.

  All of that belongs to me.

  Nate can’t take it away.

  I hope you’re happy—that’s his accusation.

  It turns out that I only have one thing I want to say in response. Two words.

  “I am.”

  Dude, that is fucking creepy.

  It’s not creepy, it’s evocative.

  It makes my balls shrivel up.

  That’s not my problem.

  No, it is, though. You made it. You made this thing that shrivels my balls, so you’ve got to own it.

  Can you stop talking about balls?

  Balls are objectively relevant to the conversation.

  Ball conversations are exclusionary. Pick a different metaphor.

  The art building has long hallways, and at night when it’s mostly deserted, they amplify every sound. I came in the door nearest the library, which means I can hear this whole conversation as I walk the span of the building.

  The building is plenty long enough to figure out who’s talking to who. West is the one who keeps referring to his balls. Annie’s the one who doesn’t want to hear it. And Raffe, I discover as I turn into the studio and get a look at what they’re discussing, is the one who’s created the strangest piece of mixed-media art I’ve ever seen.

  It’s a metal folding chair tipped over. On the floor, stuck beneath the seat, is a small cloth doll dressed up like an adult man. It has a miniature red wig, a little suit, and shoes.

  But rather than a doll’s face, it has a human face, projected onto it with a camera. Moving human features. It’s talking.

  “That is fucking creepy,” I say.

  They all three turn. West is already grinning. “See,” he says. “I told you.”

  “You made that on purpose?” I ask.

  Raffe smiles. If he were wearing overalls, he’d stick his thumbs under the straps and rock back and forth on his heels—he looks that proud. “Yep.”

  “Why?”

  Annie groans. “Don’t ask him why.”

  “But—”

  Then West is beside me, dragging me across the room by the elbow. “Never mind Raffe,” he says. “Look at this.”

  There’s a smear of something dark on his cheekbone. His T-shirt is spattered with white spots that I would swear weren’t there when he left the apartment this morning. He’s wearing the jeans he wears for art stuff, the denim almost impossible to spot under a layer of paint and slip and grease and I don’t even know what.

  Those jeans turn my crank so hard.

  So hard. Seriously, he can’t ever be allowed to know. He’ll hold it over me with his knowing smirks and bossy teasing.

  To conceal my lust, I only allow myself quick sidelong glances at his thighs, where he’s rubbed every possible art substance off his hands. The marks of all the projects that have engaged him this semester.

  There are so many of them. I think if he were anyone but West, I might be worried that all the projects were a sign of some kind of manic disorder, but I know him too well to worry. I know what it means when West sits me down and says, “Close your eyes,” and starts rustling around in one of the cabinets built into the room’s walls.

  It means he’s found something he’s excited about.

  It means he’s got something he wants to show me.

  It means he’s finally figuring out how to let himself try stuff, make mistakes, waste materials, fail.

  I’ve never seen him so happy.

  He slides his sketchbook across the table in front of me, flipped open to a page about halfway through. “Look at that,” he says.

  I see what looks like an exploded diagram of a tree. Trunk, roots, branches, all of them separated out with space between them, floating in the air. It isn’t a picture that makes sense to me, and it makes less sense when West starts piling tree parts and metal rods on the table in front of me.

  He’s assembling the pieces, telling me about drill bits and cutting tools and how he tried Lucite but it was too obvious, and then he started thinking about copper pipe, the kind of fittings you use for doing plumbing, and how that would look if he fitted the pieces together that way, and Laurie suggested he look into the kind of piping that chemists use, the old-fashioned systems, because they have a kind of elegance, so he did some research on that …

  He talks and talks, the words rushing out of him, and the whole time he’s moving. Shifting from foot to foot, reaching up to fit one piece of pipe onto another, threading fittings together.

  I have this thing for the way West moves.

  It’s worse than the jeans thing.

  Especially worse because he knows about it.

  When West is working, and happy, he gets into this physical kind of flow that unhinges the door on my libido and just lets everything out. I watch the muscles beneath his skin bunch and release. I watch his thighs in those jeans, his ass, his shoulders. Mostly, though, I watch his mouth, because I love to see him animated, love it when he’s got this much to say about something that makes him happy.

  And because it’s always his mouth for me. That mouth, and the way he moves, and the way he is, so … West. Even more West than he used to be.

  More West every day.

  “What do you think?” he asks.

  “Hmm?”

  He cocks his head. “You weren’t listening to me.”

  “I was.”

  His eyes narrow, and one corner of his mouth tips up. “You weren’t. You’ve got that look.”

  “I don’t.”

  I deny it even as I’m widening my legs in the chair. Leaning into the table with both elbows and arching my back just a little bit because it tilts my hips up and tilting my hips feels good.

  Tilting my hips feels positively necessary.

  He hops up on the tabletop, putting his jeans-clad thighs directly in front of my face. Raffe and Annie aren’t paying attention. West lowers his head toward me, drops his voice, and says, “What was I telling you about, Caro?”

  “Copper pipes.”

  “That was a while ago.”

  “Threading tools.”

  “Getting warmer.”

  “Adhesives.”

  He leans down and brushes his lips over my forehead. “Lucky guess. I’m always talking about adhesives.”

  The way he says it, it sounds like he’s telling me he wants to lick my pussy. It sends a shiver racing down my back that tightens my nipples, liquefies my low belly, and lands between my legs with a wet kiss.

  West gives me a wide, dirty smile. “What brought you over here anyway? I thought you were working on that paper.”

  I was, but I got bored. Alone on the fourth floor of the library, my mind wandered, and it’s always dangerous to let my mind wander up there, because there’s too much West-and-Caroline history for my mind to get lost in.

  Distracting history. The kind that makes it easy to convince myself I should take a break and come see how West’s project is coming along. Just in case he’s bored, too.

  West never gets bored when he’s working in the studio.

  He is, however, usually receptive to taking a certain type of break.

  “Your sister’s at Nadine’s for the night,” I say.

  His smirk widens, that wolfish gleam in his eyes intensifying. “I know.”<
br />
  “So I was thinking.” I’m tracing a pattern on his thigh with one finger.

  “What were you thinking?”

  “Maybe we should do something we couldn’t normally do. Instead of just spend the whole evening apart, working.”

  “You want to head over to the Union?” he asks. “Grab a slice of pizza?”

  “I’m not sure I’m hungry for pizza.”

  “What are you hungry for?”

  I fold my arms over his thighs, because it gives me an excuse to grope them. He’s leaning in so close, our noses almost touch. “I’m not sure. Nothing sounds good.”

  “I bet I could change your mind.”

  “I should probably get back to the library.”

  “I’ll walk you.”

  He jumps down, roots around in his bag, and comes up with something closed in his fist that he pushes into his pocket.

  “I’m gonna walk Caro to the library,” he says casually. “Back in a few.”

  “Sure,” Raffe says. “That’s completely plausible.”

  “If a few turns out to mean an hour and we bail, you want us to put your stuff away?”

  “Yeah,” West says. “Thanks.”

  He pushes me out the door with his hand on the small of my back.

  We near the staircase at the end of the hall. “Where are we going?”

  “Up,” he says. “Ladies first.”

  I climb, thinking we’ll go to the second floor, where there are empty music classrooms. But when we get there, West slips his hand between my thighs, cups my pussy, and says, “Keep going.”

  I climb some more. Throbbing.

  What’s on the third floor? Offices, I think. Does he have a key to an office? Or maybe we’ll end up in one of the bathrooms, locked in a stall—not sanitary, but he’s got his hands all over my ass and I’m breathing so fast, way too excited to care where we end up as long as it’s somewhere, soon.

  The landing. “Which way?”

  His hand on me again, the ridge at the base of his thumb drawing a line of pressure back and forth along my slit.

  Every muscle in my legs melts.

  “Keep going.”

  “That isn’t possible.”