HARDER by Olivia Hawthorne, Olivia Long Page A

him.
    After some time I began to feel the cold and needed to warm up. I extricated myself from his arms and said, “We should get you home.”
    “I don’t want to go home,” he said again and held onto my hand. He was still drunk but I could tell he was sobering up a little.
    “ My home,” I said with a smile. “I’m taking you home. You need to sober up and we both need to get warm.”
    He remained on the grass, looked off into the distance and said, “Sometimes I feel like I shouldn’t be happy, you know?”
    “Why’s that?” I asked.
    “Because they’re dead and I’m here without them. It feels wrong to live without them.”
    “I didn’t know them but I can guarantee that they would want you to be warm and comfortable at the very least. You’re not proving anything or showing your love by catching pneumonia,” I said and tugged at his hand.
    He still sat and stared. “They’re so cold, I should be cold.”
    “They’re not cold,” I said. And even though I wasn’t necessarily a religious person, I said the only thing I could think of to comfort him. “They’re in a better place, Caleb. A warm and happy place where they get to relive your love every single day. Every day they celebrate the time they had with you because that’s become their entire world. You deserve to be warm, and you deserve love too. Loving and living down here on earth doesn’t diminish what you feel for them, in fact it honors them and their memory.”
    He looked up at me with a startled look. “Do you really believe that?”
    “I do with all my heart,” I told him. “Now let me help you, Caleb Harder. Let me honor their memory by taking care of you when you so obviously desperately need it.”
    He stood then and looked down at me, reminding me again how impossibly tall and muscular and bloody good looking he was. He gave me a crooked smile and said, “What is it about you?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You make everything better,” he said. He grew serious and brought his fingers up to brush against my jawline. “The past three years have been like living in a nightmare. I haven’t even been living, just existing. The moment I saw Lucy standing in my flowerbed, things have been changing. And the moment I saw you there, god…nothing has been the same.”
    My mind was racing a million miles a minute trying to process exactly what he was telling me. He’d already confessed that he wanted more than just friendship from me, but he was so vulnerable just then that I didn’t know how to react. I decided I’d play it safe. “That’s what friends do,” I told him and thrust my jaw out defiantly as if challenging him to say otherwise.
    “Yes, that’s true,” he said and seemed to refocus his eyes on my face. “But if I weren’t so drunk and fucked up I would show you exactly what I want out of our friendship, Brooke.”
    My breath caught in my throat and I could see his pulse throbbing in a vein on his neck seeming to match the fluttering of my own heart. “And what would that be?”
    He drew in a long breath, ran his hand through his thick hair and looked back down at me. “This,” he said softly and dipped towards me to lock his mouth on mine and kiss me deeply.
    I could taste the alcohol on his tongue and normally that would be an anxiety trigger for me. Whenever Rolland drank he became even more horrible than usual, so the smell and taste of booze shut me down.
    But everything else about Caleb made that one thing disappear. His scent, even under the alcohol, was powerful and masculine. The way his lips felt on mine, the way his tongue commanded mine and made me feel like he was claiming me…all of that meant more to me than the taste of him.
    And god, the noises he made in the back of his throat. Deep little growls like he wanted to tear my clothes off and plunge into me, split me open and release his lust on my body. The way his hands traveled along my back, the way his huge hand grabbed the back of my