Harder Read Online Free PDF Page B

disappearing,” I say.
    He just chews and swallows, staring, straight ahead.
    I lean close and whisper so only he can hear me. “I’m not leaving until I know you’re okay.”
    Everything about him gets still. He doesn’t even breathe, and I’m holding my own breath in sympathy, so caught up in him that I don’t even realize it until he draws air deep into his lungs and turns toward me. His face bare inches away.
    His thigh hot alongside mine.
    His eyes, his nose, his mouth, his face.
    God.
    There can’t be another woman. Not between me and West—there
can’t
be, because if there were, I wouldn’t feel like this. I
couldn’t
feel like this. This alive. This real.
    Not if he didn’t feel it, too.
    “So if I tell you I’m okay, you’ll go?” he asks.
    “I have to believe it.”
    My white shirt is reflected in his eyes, a glare against the darkness of his pupils.
    His nostrils flare. I know he feels something. I know he’s got things he wants to say to me. So why won’t he open his mouth and say them?
    After he left Putnam, West shut down any conversation that included the words
move
or
transfer
, any talk of seeing each other again. Everything is black or white for West. His mom went back to his dad, so he had to go back to Frankie.
    All he got of her was one afternoon a week at the McDonald’s near her school. An hour for West to look his sister and his mom over for bruises, interpret their answers to his questions, wait for the day he found out something was wrong.
    The rest of the time, he worked. He slept. He went to the bars with Bo, and every now and then got drunk enough to call and tell me the truth as he saw it.
    We were over. I shouldn’t keep trying to be his friend. I shouldn’t text him.
    We were over, so we shouldn’t be talking on the phone at two in the morning, except we
were
. Because he’d called me. And once we were talking, we found ourselves joking, meandering around until he said something or I did and we slid down into the dark together, hands where they shouldn’t be, saying everything we’d been holding back.
    Miss you
.
    Want you
.
    Need you
.
    Still love you
.
    Baby, I can’t. I can’t
.
    He’d tell me I deserved better, but I could never make myself believe there was anyone for me but West.
    I watch the color rise in his cheeks. I look at his throat, where his pulse beats. I feel the heat coming off him, the want.
    He can lie to me in a text. He can lie over the phone. But he can’t sit here and lie to me with his body.
    “Make me believe you’re fine,” I say. “Tell me you don’t miss me. You don’t want me. You’re not thinking about me all the time, as much as I’m thinking about you.” I reach out for his thigh and find a grip above the knee.
“Tell me.”
    The muscles in his leg twitch beneath my fingers. West wraps a hand around the back of my neck.
    He leans in close.
    I think he means to say something harsh, to convey the hard truth of our hopeless situation. I should brace myself for it, except I can’t. That hand on the back of my neck makes me soften instantly, everywhere.
    This is how he used to kiss me. Just like this. And whenhe lets me this close, looks at me this way, I can see right into him and catalog every feeling chasing its way across his face.
    His longing. His lust.
    His need for me, his craving for my softness, his desire to claim something tender in this blighted life of his.
    I can see anguish, too. Agony.
    I watch agony overpower his tenderness, wrestle its way to the forefront, and shut down his expression until all the feeling left is in his lawless, angry eyes.
    “Stay with Frankie,” he says. “That’s all I want from you.”
    He stands and walks out of the room, like that’s a normal thing to do. Get up in the middle of everything, step over the crawling baby, stuff his plate in the garbage can and go.
    Go wherever.
    Go somewhere I can’t follow him.
    I think about borrowing a car, asking for directions out to Bo’s