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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.

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
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