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I picked him. Him.
This is where we are now. Who we are right now. Us.
I don’t know how I’ll feel in the morning. I’m not pretending it’s all going to be perfect, that it’s perfect now, or even that perfect is a real thing that exists in the world. But tonight, there’s no bullshit between the two of us. There’s just his hand sliding up my thigh. His mouth moving down, his breath on my clit.
What he wants to do. What I want to let him give me.
That’s all this is.
I put my hand over the top of his head, rake my nails over his scalp and give him one hard, firm push.
“Easy there, tiger,” he says. “We’re taking it slow, remember?”
This time when he smiles, it’s his real smile. I know, because it hits me down low and deep, makes me shudder, makes me wetter than I already was.
“So slow, Caro. You’re gonna hate me for it.”
I don’t, though.
He tortures me, asks me every now and then, “You happy?”
I keep saying yes even though he’s killing me.
Yes, yes, West, God.
He kills me and kills me.
I’m so happy, I could die.
West
Can I talk to you?
That’s what I asked Caroline in her room, in her bed.
Can I talk to you? I asked Frankie the next morning over pancakes.
I called her counselor and set up another meeting. Can I talk to you?
I left my boss at the window plant a message, asking him to call me back, giving notice that I’d be quitting as soon as I found work with daylight hours.
I don’t think I’d ever talked so much in my life as I talked that November.
You get your mind made up that you know how everything is and so there’s no point in talking. You know what you’ve got to do. You know what the future looks like.
And then you hit some pivot point, some paradigm shift that shows you everything you thought you knew wasn’t right, so you start going around all the time saying, Can we talk? I have to ask you something. I’ve got things I need to tell you.
I guess it’s because I’m stubborn—because I get set in my ways, pulling the cart through the same ruts day after day—b
ut I always thought when I asked people to talk to me that I knew how the conversation would go. What I’d say. What they’d say back.
It’s funny, because I was always wrong.
Those weeks in November and on into December—they were full of surprises. Happy surprises, sad surprises, gutting surprises, frustrating surprises, amazing surprises.
Caroline was sometimes the biggest surprise of all, because she kept coming around. Staying over. Sticking by me. And those were the weeks that everything finally changed.
I stopped thinking I knew how my life was going to go.
