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I’m not over him. I’ve tried to reason myself into it, but I’m learning reason doesn’t have anything to do with love, and West has always made me softer than I wanted to be, weaker than was good for me.
Before we crashed and burned, though, I liked the person I was with him. He made me vulnerable, but he helped me be stronger, too.
“You want to fill me in on what’s going on?” I ask.
A muscle ticks in his jaw. “I’ve been at work. I don’t know what’s going on.”
“What was happening when you went to work?”
“My dad was dead.”
“Where’s Frankie?”
Last I heard, his sister and his mom were living with his dad at the trailer park where West grew up. West had dropped out of college and moved home to Oregon so he could protect them, but there’s only so much you can do to save someone who doesn’t want to be saved.
His mom wouldn’t leave his dad, and West wouldn’t go near the trailer with his dad living in it. That meant West wasn’t seeing Frankie as often as he would have liked. It bothered him not being able to get close enough to protect her the way he wanted to.
“She’s out at my grandma’s,” he says. “I have to pick her up.”
“Does she seem okay?”
“I can’t tell.”
“She wasn’t there, was she? When he got …”
“Mom says she was at a sleepover.”
His knuckles are white on the steering wheel. I watch the color drain from his skin all the way to the base of each finger as he squeezes tighter.
“You don’t believe her?”
“I’m not sure.”
Then we’re quiet. He’s got a cut on his right hand in the space between his thumb and his index finger. The skin is half scabbed over, pink and puffy around the edges with curls of dry skin. I can see two places where it’s cracked.
A burn. Or a bad scrape.
Back in Putnam, I’d have known where he got a cut like that. I’d have nagged him to put a Band-Aid on it or at least spread some lotion around so it would heal better. I probably would have made a disgusted face and told him to cover it up.
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.
