Текст книги "Deeper"
Автор книги: Robin York
Соавторы: Robin York,Robin York
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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 20 страниц)
Her shoulders are shaking. I’m not sure when she quits laughing and starts crying, or if she even does quit. It’s maybe all the same thing. Laughing and crying together.
I just know that when she looks up, the tears make her eyes shine, and that’s where the stars are.
That’s how it looks to me. Like the stars are in Caroline, and the whole world is just me and her.
Because I’m stoned.
And because I’m in love with her.
“This, too, Caro,” I say, leaning in. “This is completely my fault.”
When our lips meet, she breathes in, and that’s all that happens. Maybe for a second, maybe forever—it’s hard to tell when you’re stoned. Time gets unpredictable. Sex gets much bigger and much smaller, both, because you can feel everything. Every hair, every breath, every heartbeat, every firing inch of skin. It’s distracting. I get distracted by how Caroline’s mouth feels soft but dry, and it’s like shaking hands, this kiss. Taking her measure. Saying hello. It’s not sexy. It’s … interesting.
“Weird,” she says against my mouth.
“You’re weird.”
“Look who’s talking.”
I lick her bottom lip, and she sinks to her elbows.
I follow her down and do it again. “Still weird?”
“You’re licking me,” she murmurs.
“How’s that working for you?”
She closes her eyes. “I think …”
I draw her lip into my mouth and bite it gently. It feels fleshy between my teeth, more substantial than it looks. I want to do this to every part of her. Lick it and taste it, bite it, test it. Consume her, piece by piece.
“Don’t think. Thinking isn’t your friend.”
“You’re not my friend, either.”
“Funny.” I get my hand in her hair, my thumb under her jawline, tilting her head where I want it so I can really kiss her.
I think, fleetingly, Don’t, and then I do.
Our tongues meet. Our teeth bump gently, and she makes this sound with her breath that would be a laugh if she weren’t so busy sinking her fingers into my hair and kissing me back.
If we were friends, it would be disgusting. Spit and tongues, teeth and lips.
But we’re not friends.
It’s fucking amazing.
I kiss her hard. I control her, use her mouth, direct her head.
I kiss her soft. Tongue that sexy gap between her teeth. Pull back, let her take over, show me what she likes, how she wants it.
She does want it. Maybe only tonight, maybe for all the wrong reasons, I don’t know. I’m not thinking about it. I’m kissing Caroline, which is better than thinking.
We fall into this kind of haze, nothing touching but our mouths, hands stroking over hair, necks, shoulders. I’m hard, but it feels like a faraway piece of information, with no urgency to it. This isn’t sex. It’s kissing. The forever kind of kissing, where there’s no urgency and no time. Kissing like waves lapping. Perfect kissing.
“Still weird?”
“So weird.”
She’s smiling when she pulls my head back down.
Caroline’s smiling, and we’re kissing, and everything is perfect, until light cuts across her face and she says, “Oh, shit.”
Headlights in the driveway.
“My dad.”
Her Romeo and Juliet balcony turns out to be the perfect height for dropping into the backyard.
My car turns out to be in just the right spot for getting out of Dodge without being spotted.
But the drive between Ankeny and Putnam is way too short for me to sort out what the fuck it is I thought I was doing and way too long to endure the memory of Caroline’s mouth against mine.
The apartment looks alien when I get back. Small and cold and ugly. Empty.
I go into my room and shut the door. I flop onto my back on the bed, feeling tired and used up.
My phone rings. I almost decide not to answer it, because I know it’s got to be Caroline.
I can’t talk to her. I have to get my head on straight first, figure out what that was. Figure out why, when I snuck down her driveway at a crawl with my headlights off, half of me was hoping I wouldn’t get caught and the other half was disappointed, ashamed, fucking furious with her for making me feel like her dirty little secret.
When I glance at the screen, it’s not her, though. It’s my mom.
“Hey, what’s up?” I ask.
Frankie’s voice. “Dad’s here.”
My heart jolts. I sit up so fast that my vision narrows. I have to put my palm to my forehead to steady myself. “Where are you?”
“At home. At Bo’s. He’s—he won’t go away, West. You have to make him go away.”
She sounds like she’s about to cry, her voice high and reedy, right on the verge of losing it.
Frankie never cries.
“Okay, take a deep breath, kiddo. You’re inside, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And he’s outside.”
“Uh-huh. And I locked the front door, but he’s pounding and pounding on it. I’m afraid it’ll break!”
Now that she says it, I can hear the pounding. I’m thousands of miles away, and the sound scares the fuck out of me. I still remember him outside the trailer, yelling at my mom in the middle of the night.
“Michelle! Let me in! Let me into my own goddamn house, you worthless slit!”
He was drunk, Mom told me. He was angry. He didn’t mean it. But I shouldn’t worry, because she would never, ever let him hurt me.
It wasn’t even forty-eight hours later that she let him into her bedroom.
He hurt me plenty.
“West?” Frankie’s voice is wobbly. “I’m scared, West.”
My hands are shaking from adrenaline. I push myself until my back is in contact with the wall. I need something hard to brace against. “I know, sweetheart, but that’s a solid door, and he’s not going to get through it. Where’s Mom and Bo?”
“They went out.”
Drinking, I guess she means. It’s only ten in Oregon. They won’t be back for hours.
“Did you lock the back?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“All right. Can you go do that now for me?”
“Yeah, but West—”
“Just lock the back door. One thing at a time, Franks.”
The pounding grows faint. She’s breathing heavy, fast. Scared to death. I try to focus on the sound of my own inhalations and exhalations.
When she was little and she had a bad dream, I’d take her into my bed and let her curl up beside me, matching our breathing until we both fell back asleep.
“I got it,” she says.
“Top and bottom?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, now the windows.”
“What about the windows?” Frankie asks.
“Check them, just to be sure.”
One thing about Bo—he’s a paranoid guy. Name a conspiracy theory and he’s a believer. Plus, he grows weed in a clearing in the woods behind the house and works as a guard at a prison that regularly releases men who hate his guts back into the stream of society. Bo’s house is a flimsy one-story POS ranch, but he’s got solid locks on the doors and bars on all the windows.
I murmur reassurances.
“It’ll be all right, baby.
“He’s not going to hurt you.
“He won’t get inside.”
But I don’t know. I’m not there. It’s taking everything I’ve got not to grill her for details.
“I checked them,” she says finally. “They’re locked.”
“Good girl. Now get as far from the door as you can so you don’t have to hear it.”
“He’s crying, West.”
“Just tune him out.”
“I feel bad for him.”
“Don’t. He made his bed. Go sit in the tub, okay?”
“Why?”
“You won’t be able to hear in there. It’ll be like you’re in a bubble.”
“That’s dumb.”
“Hey, who called who for help here?”
I imagine her smiling, even though I’m not. I’ve got nothing to smile about.
I hear the shower curtain rings sliding over the rod. Then her breathing is louder.
“You in there now, Franks?”
“Yeah.”
She’ll have one arm wrapped around her knees, just like Caroline up on the roof. I see her in her nightgown, her dark hair hanging over her arms, down her back. Her skinny legs, mosquito-bitten, covered in scratches and sores. Bare toes dirty.
Summer Frankie. But it’s November, and when I talked to Mom on Thanksgiving she said there was snow on the ground. I haven’t seen my sister in three months.
“Should I call the police?” she asks.
I think of Bo’s crop, the plants up to his chin. I know it’s not like that now. He’s harvested for the season. Last time I talked to him he told me he was letting the Indica buds mature, but pretty soon he’s going to be heading down to California to sell.
He doesn’t usually keep any of it in the house. He knows the law. He taught me it’s essential to know what you can go down for, if you’re gonna go down. Never carry enough to get charged with felony possession.
Still. What if he’s not following his own rules? I don’t want to be responsible for calling the cops out to Bo’s house and getting him in deep shit. If he loses his job, goes to jail, then Mom probably loses hers, too, and we’re all screwed.
Frankie’s just a little girl, defenseless, huddled in the tub.
“What happened?” I ask.
“I was watching TV. Mom said to go to bed by nine, but there was this movie on and I knew she wasn’t going to be back, so I watched it, and then I heard him knocking. It was so loud, West.”
“Did you open the door for him?”
“No. Mom said not to.”
“Mom knows he’s back?”
“We ran into him in town. He’s living at the trailer.”
“He’s not. Franks—tell me you’re joking.”
“Yeah, he is! He says it’s his, and we got no right to keep him out of it.”
“That fucker. What happened to Hailey?”
“She moved in with her boyfriend.”
I put my cousin Hailey in that trailer on purpose. I paid up the lot rent for the whole school year. I wanted Mom and Frankie to have a place to go if things went to shit with Bo, but I never thought of this. I never thought I’d be paying for that lowlife son of a bitch to have a home base to terrorize my little sister from.
I shove my heels into the blanket, pressing against the springs. I’ve got my head down, elbows between my knees, and I wish I was with Frankie. I wish I was there for her.
I wish I was where I belong.
“What’s he saying?”
“What do you mean—now?”
“No, I mean, what did he say when he got there? What’s he want?”
“He says, ‘Come out, baby girl. Your daddy wants to see you.’ And he called Mom a bitch, but then he said he didn’t mean it, that she broke his heart and that crap.”
“Don’t go out there, Frankie.”
She huffs. “I know, West. I’m not stupid.”
“Did he sound mad?”
“He sounds drunk.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He’s all, like, slobbery.”
“Jesus.”
She’s silent a moment. “I don’t hear him pounding anymore.”
She’s more herself now. I think she feels better in the shower with the doors all locked. Plus, she likes knowing something I don’t know. Being the one who tells me things for a change.
“I’m going to see if his truck is still there.”
“Be careful.”
“I will.”
I hear the shower curtain again, and then her breath is quieter, more even, as she moves through the house to the curtain. “He’s gone.”
“Good. But keep everything locked up.”
“I will.”
We’re quiet. Just breathing.
“Stay with me awhile,” she says.
“As long as you need me.”
It’s hours before she’s asleep. We watch a movie together, talk about nothing—her petty friendship dramas, the new hair bands she got, a singer she loves who’s going to be in a movie she wants to go see next time Mom is off work.
I hang up, finally, to the sound of Frankie breathing, heavy and slow.
She’s safe. She’s fine.
But I feel like I’m falling, and there’s nothing solid for me to grab hold of.
DECEMBER
Caroline
I wonder, sometimes, why I couldn’t see what was happening.
I mean, it was obvious to absolutely everyone. It should have been obvious to me. That night on the roof, how it ended, how my lips felt soft and changed for hours afterward, how I kept touching them, how I couldn’t think of anything else. Not for days.
That ridiculous deal we struck.
My impatience for Bridget to go to her Tuesday/Thursday morning class so I could sit on my bed and wait for his knock. Two taps, always two. And I would go to the door and pull it open, and there he’d be. Back again, when I’d been afraid that this was the day he wouldn’t show.
Back again to lie on my bed and put his mouth all over me, his hands all over me, to breathe hot and short against my neck while I pretended that my heart wasn’t dark and rich, full to bursting with the sound and smell and taste of him.
I don’t know why I didn’t understand. I guess I was afraid.
I never knew there could be so much ecstasy in fear.
He’s been avoiding me for a week. More than a week. Nine days.
At first I didn’t realize. I was too wrapped up in my brain fog of what-the-heck-happened, and then I went out to brunch with my dad, who wanted to talk about My Future. Only now the conversation was more awkward than ever, because part of me was happily nodding along, thinking, Yes! I’m going to get a great internship this summer, but I also had to contend with the chorus of Internet Asshats saying, Not with your cunt online!
And, meanwhile, the new, completely West-centric part of my brain was busy squeeing, I got stoned and made out with West on the roof—O-M-effing-G.
All of which means that I missed a lot of cues, said weird things, and got frowned at by my dad, who didn’t understand why I’d turned into such a freak.
I drove back to school on Sunday afternoon and sent West a text when I arrived. He wrote back, Cool.
Cool.
Who even says cool?
I don’t know, but I told myself maybe it was good that he didn’t seem too enthused to see me. We probably needed some time apart, a few days to sort through what that … that episode on the roof meant. And since I’d just had a serious talk with my dad, I’ll admit, I figured I could use a little space from West, to think about what I was doing.
I watched a lot of TV and bad movies with Bridget. I went to Quinn’s room with Krishna and split two six-packs and laughed at Harold & Kumar.
I didn’t think about what I was doing.
I didn’t go to the bakery, either. I would have on Tuesday night, but West usually texts to ask if he’s going to see me, and he didn’t. So I didn’t. I slept instead. Straight through the night, like a normal person.
I did it again Wednesday night.
Thursday I sent him four texts, but he didn’t answer them.
Friday I sent him a fifth. WTF, West?
He wrote back three hours later. Sorry. Busy.
Saturday, Sunday—nothing. I went to rugby practice and accomplished my first really great tackle. I hung out with Quinn and Bridget after. I asked Quinn if she’d seen West since break, and she said, “Yeah, why?”
No reason.
By Monday, though, all the stuff I didn’t want to think about was making its existence known. I was starting to feel shitty. The Asshat Chorus was getting loud.
You knew when you invited him over, the men said. You knew when you had him bring the weed. You wanted him to fuck you on top of that roof.
Did I? I can’t remember. I can’t decide. Everything seems so murky.
That night, I broke down and told Bridget what had happened, and she got so pissed at West.
“He can’t treat you like that! It’s not right!”
She convinced me to call him. I left an angry voice mail. I texted again, demanding he get in touch with me. Bridget grabbed my phone out of my hand and called him a “fucker,” which I then apologized for, but he still didn’t text me back.
I couldn’t sleep after that. Bridget snored softly in her bunk above me, and I pulled out my phone and wrote: I feel terrible about what happened on the roof.
I feel dirty.
I feel ashamed.
Why aren’t you talking to me?
In the morning, I wished I could take those texts back. Overdramatic much, Caroline?
But they were sent, and that was that.
It’s Tuesday after class when he texts me back. The phone chimes when I’m lying on my stomach, staring at my fingernails and trying to work up some enthusiasm for lunch.
Nothing dirty about it, West writes.
A whole sentence fragment. How about that?
Then why are you avoiding me?
I’m not. I’m busy.
That never stopped you before.
Sorry.
I wait to see if he’s going to give me a better explanation, but he doesn’t, and I’m so sick of it. I’m sick of him.
I’m sick of myself, too. How am I letting this happen? After what Nate did, I didn’t let the misery get me down. I took action. Now one kiss from West and I’m reduced to this text-groveling?
Fuck that.
Come over to my room and talk to me, I text. Right now.
I have class.
I look at the clock. Not for an hour.
Nothing for a moment. I scroll back through the blue and green bubbles of our conversation, trying to recognize myself in these demands. Trying to recognize the West who rubbed my neck in the apartment, who put his hand on my thigh and asked me what he was going to do about me. The West who said, “This is completely my fault,” right before he kissed me senseless.
Ok, he texts.
And then I wait.
Well, all right, I change into jeans and put my hair down and then I wait.
I don’t know why we have a cliché about watched pots and boiling water. Clearly there should be one about waiting for a boy you kissed while stoned on a roof to come by and explain himself.
A watched West never shows up.
But, you know, less lame.
Finally, after an eternity, he knocks twice. I open the door, and I don’t know. I don’t know. His pale eyes are West’s eyes, and his face is West’s face, and how did I not see him for nine whole days? How did I forget what he does to me?
I want to sink into him, weave our fingers together, kiss his closed eyelids, and welcome him back.
I don’t do it. I’m not completely crazy. But the wanting is there, oppressive as a hand pushing me under.
Kind of beautiful, too.
I look away, desperate to get ahold of myself. He’s wearing a coat that seems gray at first, but when you get close up you see it’s made of black and white stripes close together in a kind of chevron pattern. I can’t imagine where somebody would get a coat like that, except maybe my grandpa’s closet. It should be strange or ugly, but it’s like everything West wears—he makes it seem sexy. Like old-man coats are the thing this year.
“Nice coat.”
He gives me that blank look. As though I’m the woman at the dining hall who swipes his ID. Some anonymous person he barely knows. “Thanks.”
I step back. He’s never been in my room before. It’s a little surprising how small he makes it, just by walking into the middle of it.
“You want me to take that?”
He shrugs off his old-man coat and drops it on the couch. Then drops himself down next to it.
One of his eyebrows is a little lifted, which I guess is supposed to mean, Well, Caroline?
I sit on the bed. I pull my pillow onto my lap, pluck at the pillowcase, which has Smurfs on it. They’re supposed to be ironic Smurfs, but maybe that’s like ironic whale pants. An impossibility.
I remind myself why I made West come over here. Because I kissed Nate and he put my naked pictures online. Then I kissed West and he stopped talking to me. I’m tired of this shit.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re mad at me.”
“I’m not.” He’s fixated on this spot on the floor, like all the world’s secrets are written there, pinhead-small.
“You’re disgusted with me.”
“No.”
“You wish you’d never kissed me.”
He meets my eyes for a fraction of a second. Looks at the secret spot again. “Yeah.” But then he looks back at my face. “No.”
“Which is it?”
“Both.”
“What am I supposed to do with that, West?”
He sighs. His hair falls forward, covering his eyes, and he clasps his hands between his knees, that bracelet at his wrist spelling out the letters of his name, a symbol of everything he won’t share with me. “I told you from the beginning how it’s going to be with us.”
“You said you wouldn’t touch me.”
He nods but doesn’t look up.
“You did touch me, though.”
“I fucking know that, Caroline.”
“Don’t get snippy with me. You don’t have any right. We were both up there. We were both kissing.”
“Yeah, but I’m the one who had to jump off the balcony, aren’t I?”
“That’s why you’re pissed at me?”
“I’m not pissed at you!”
Finally he’s looking at me, but it’s not any help. His indrawn eyebrows and scowling mouth mean he’s mad about something. If it’s not me, then what? “You sure seem like it.”
He stands up. Paces back and forth a few times. Glances at the bunked beds, Bridget’s empty desk, my cluttered one. He picks up the framed picture of me with my dad and my sisters at my high school graduation and sets it back down.
He points to the picture. “You know what I said to him?”
“Who, my dad?”
He crosses his arms. “I said, ‘So that’s your daughter?’ This was after I’d carried you up the stairs and laid you out on the bed. I stood right over you, staring at your tits, and I said, ‘I’m right across the hall. Coed dorms, man. This is going to be sweet.’”
He uses his drug-dealer voice, his stoner voice—utterly fake if you know West but convincingly awful if you don’t. I can hear exactly how it must have sounded to my dad. Like his baby girl was moving in across the hall from a date rapist, or at the very least a lecherous creep.
It’s a miracle Dad ever left Putnam.
“Why?”
“So you’d have a good reason to keep the fuck away from me.”
“Yeah, I get that, but I don’t understand. And don’t try to feed me any garbage about me being rich and you being poor or you being too noble or whatever.”
He makes a face. Walks away toward the window, turning his back on me. “I’m not noble.”
“Then what are you?”
No answer. The silence spins out, Bridget’s Putnam College clock ticking out the seconds—one, two, three, four, five, with no answer—until suddenly West spins around and says, “I’m fucking selfish, all right? I’ve got plans for the future, and you’re not in them. You’re not ever going to be in them, Caro, so it just makes more sense for me to keep away from you so I can focus on what’s important.”
What’s important. Which is not me.
I gaze at Smurfette on my lap, her golden puff of hair and her stupid fuck-me shoes and her dress, and I want to punch her. I want to punch myself, right where it hurts, right where West’s words lanced into the old burning pain beneath my lungs, that vital spot he keeps hitting me in without even caring enough to mean to.
He’s not trying to hurt me. He’s just selfish.
“Don’t look like that,” he says.
“I will look however I want.” I enunciate every word, slowly and carefully, because I don’t want him to know that he’s hurt me.
I turn the pillow over. I trace the outline of Brainy Smurf’s hat. I always identified with Brainy.
“Caro—”
“Maybe you should go.”
He picks up his coat. He walks over to the door. I wait for it to open, wait for him to walk out, wait for the part of my life that doesn’t have West in it to begin.
But he stands there, and then he leans into the door and kicks it viciously, three times. He kicks the door so hard that I jump.
The hair on my arms lifts.
The violence is a bell ringing inside me. An announcement that something is beginning, something’s been unleashed.
He turns back toward me. “I don’t want to go. Okay? That’s my problem, Caroline. I never want to go.”
“What do you want, then?”
I’m almost in tears. I’m almost shouting, because I don’t know. I’ve never known.
He walks over, drops his coat on Bridget’s bunk, braces both hands on the metal framework of the bed. His feet are wide, straddling mine, blocking out the ceiling light. I can’t see his face, but when he says, “I want to kiss you again,” I can hear the softness of his mouth. I can almost feel it.
West nudges my foot with his, boxes in my knee. “I could feed you a line about how I want that because I think you need somebody to show you you’re not broken, how you’re beautiful and sexy and if you’re dirty it’s only in the good way, the way everybody is dirty. I could tell you that, and it would be true, but what’s really true is that I’m selfish and I want you. I don’t know how to stop wanting you. I’m just really fucking tired of trying.”
He shifts slightly, letting the light loose around his head. It brightens his ear, shows me his eyes. They are hard and glittering and full of something I’ve seen there a hundred times but never knew what to call it.
Need. Greed.
This is what West looks like when he’s greedy.
His greed is for me.
I can’t think. Breathing is all I can handle. Breathing and watching him.
“I wanted you from the minute I saw you,” he says. “I want you right now, and you can barely stand me. I can barely stand me, so I don’t know why you put up with my shit, but even right now, when I hate myself and you’re pissed at me, I still want to push you down on the bed and take off your shirt and get inside you. Get deep inside you, and then deeper, until I’m so deep I don’t even know what’s me anymore and what’s you.”
He squats down and crosses his arms over my thighs and leans way in. Our noses are a millimeter apart. I want to turn my head away, except I don’t. His mouth moves so close to mine that it feels like kissing when he says, “That’s what I want, Caroline. That’s what I never told you. I see your face when I close my eyes. Over break, when you called? I jerked off to the sound of your voice while you were on the phone. I’m selfish and no good for you, I’ve got nothing to give you and no room for you in my life, and I want you anyway.”
I’m still. So still, because I need to let his words sink in.
Not so I can figure them out. It’s going to take me a long time to figure them out, and right now I don’t care. I just need to feel what he said all the way through me, because his greed—his need—is all around me, touching my skin, and my heart wants to gather it in.
Deep and then deeper, just like he said.
So I do that while he waits. I pack his words around my heart, knowing I shouldn’t, because they’re not the right words. It’s dangerous to want West so much that I’ll take any crumb he gives me—any profane, broken piece of him—and turn it into a love letter.
It’s desperate and damaged, stupid and wrong.
I don’t care. I don’t care.
“West?” I whisper.
“Yeah.”
Our lips are touching, dry brushes of his mouth over mine when he speaks and then after—I guess after, which means this is a kiss, even though I haven’t admitted I’m open to more kissing.
“You’re a horrible friend.”
“We’re not friends.”
His hands. His hands on my face again, cupping my jaw, framing my ear, fingers slipping into my hair.
“You would be the worst boyfriend in the entire history of boyfriends.”
He drops, knees on the floor now, one arm at my hips pulling me closer so I’m practically falling off the edge of the bed, except he’s there to catch me. His mouth is open. His tongue is hot. Licking me. Asking me to let him in. “Not gonna be your boyfriend.”
“Then what. What.”
It’s not a question. I’m not capable of concentrating enough to ask him a question, because I’m falling into him, finding a way around his elbows and his roving hands to get him closer, tighter. My lips yield to his tongue. I’m pulsing and hot, slick and floating, lost and stupid, and it’s better than anything.
He gets a knee between my legs, drags me up his thigh with both hands on my butt. He kisses me hard, hard enough that it hurts, but I don’t care, because all I want is him closer. I don’t care until he pulls my head back and nips at my neck and I look up at the ceiling, where the light is so bright it hurts my eyes. I close them, dizzy, and the brightness flashes like a strobe.
Like a camera.
This is nuts.
This is reckless.
“West,” I say.
“Caroline,” he mutters.
“Stop.”
He stops.
When he lifts his head, his eyes are sex-drugged and sleepy. His lips are red, his skin flushed behind the stubble on his chin, and I feel the tingling raw spot on my neck where he scraped against me. I want him to do that everywhere on my body—leave marks behind, make me tingle and ache and then fix it—and I don’t recognize this version of myself. I don’t know who I am when I’m like this.
“I need …”
He braces his hands on my shoulders, setting me apart from him. But keeping me there, one arm’s length away. “What do you need?”
“Rules. Boundaries. I need some idea … what this is.”
He looks down toward the floor, but his gaze gets caught on my chest. I look down, too, and watch the sly grin spread over his face as he stares at my nipples poking through my shirt.
“Quit that.”
“You’re into me,” he says.
“Shut up.”
“You’re so into me. I bet you’re wet right now.”
“I bet you’re hard.”
“It’s like Thor’s mighty hammer in my pants.” He says it with a smirk.
“Didn’t the hammer have a name?”
West says something that sounds like Mole-near.
“Spell it.”
“M-j-o-l-n-i-r.”
“Jesus. Why do you know that?”
“A better question might be why we’re talking about it.”
“Because guys love talking about how big and hard their hammers are?”
“And what they want to do with them. Don’t forget.”
I ease out from under his hands and sit up on the bed again. “Yeah. That part.”
West sits next to me, but he gives me some room to think.
So I think. About his hand on his hammer. “You really did that when we were on the phone?”
He smiles, but he looks kind of sheepish. Not an expression I see on West very often.
“I mean, really-really? You’re not just saying that because you’re trying to flatter me?”
“If I wanted to flatter you, I’d tell you that shirt looks pretty on you. Or that I like your eyes. Something that’s, you know, actually nice.”
I glance down at my knees and smile.
I think about what I want and what I need, what I can take and what I can’t do without.
Maybe I’m traumatized. Maybe I’m being irrational. I don’t know.
I want West, though. Any version of West I can have, any way I can have him.
And it isn’t as though, if he were willing to give me everything, I could even take it. As my dad so recently reminded me, there’s my future to think of. There’s my reputation, which I can’t really put to the test by dating the campus drug dealer.
I don’t want to date West. I want him to show me what deeper feels like.
Deep and then deeper. All the way down.
“All right,” I tell him. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”
Twice a week. Tuesdays and Thursdays, ten o’clock to ten-fifty, while Bridget’s in class and West is in between and I’ve got nothing until lunch.
We’re not going to date, and we’re not going to tell.
Those are our rules.
I spend the time before West shows up on Thursday zoning out. Like, I keep thinking I have it together, but then my brain will wander off like a wayward child, and I’m helpless to prevent it. Bridget keeps asking me what happened with West, but I can’t say. He and I made a deal. And, anyway, what would I tell her? That I decided to be West’s friend with benefits? His fuck buddy? That we’re going to do a Get Caroline Back in the Saddle training program twice a week?
