Deeper

FEBRUARY West

January ended. February came.

I quit selling weed and got rid of my stash. Without Caroline around, the bakery was dead. I worked hard, studied while the bread rose, listened to the buzzing fluorescents.

It was boring. Boring and miserable.

Three weeks passed when I didn’t see Caroline, and, even so, she was woven through my life. My memories, my dreams, my thoughts. It turns out you can’t cut someone out of your heart just by wanting to.

I didn’t want to hurt her.

I didn’t want to hand her the power to wreck me.

I didn’t want to fuck her and walk away like it meant nothing, like she meant nothing.

I just wanted to be with her. All the time. Every way. Even though I was leaving, and even though I didn’t deserve her.

“Deeper or nothing”—that’s what she said before she walked out of my apartment and out of my life.

I was too scared to pick. Too scared to follow her outside, tell her what she wanted to know, go down on my knees and beg if I had to.

I was too caught up in all these questions I didn’t have answers to.

What if you go after the love of your life and it ruins you?

What if you don’t, and you figure out you’re already ruined?

What if there’s no right thing? Only you and the girl you love and your fear. A ticking clock, a mother you can’t trust, a sister who needs you, a father determined to fuck up anything good you manage to get your hands on.

I’d shied away from deeper, but I never gave much thought to the alternative.

Nothing, or deeper.

My choice to make.

What kind of dipshit chooses nothing?

Smoke fills my lungs, and it’s been so long, the rush is immediate.

The high is ugly. It amplifies my bad mood, so much that I can feel my lip curl, the corners of my mouth turning down. My nostrils flare.

I take another deep drag.

I’m on the sun porch at the back of the restaurant, grabbing a five-minute smoke in the middle of the Valentine’s Day service rush. It’s cold out here, the sounds of the kitchen muffled by insulation and wood siding.

Tips are good tonight. I should be content to work, but I’m crawling out of my fucking skin.

I haven’t seen Caroline in twenty-two days.

In the window, against the darkness outside, my reflection stares back at me, pissed off and mean.

I look like my father.

I’m the age he was in my first memory of him. He bought me a bike with training wheels and Spider-Man on the seat. I thought he was fucking amazing. My father, I mean. Not Spidey, although Spidey was pretty great, too.

My dad and my mom were always kissing, hands everywhere. I wasn’t allowed in Mom’s bed at night when he came around. They made noises in there, so I had to squint my eyes closed and send my thoughts away. I would lie on the couch under an old green nylon sleeping bag, rubbing the satiny lining under my chin, thinking about how awesome it would be when they got married. How I’d have two parents.

Kids with two parents lived in a house with a yard. I knew this because I watched the kids at school who had what I wanted, and the main thing they had was dads and moms. Dads with jobs and wedding rings who showed up for school concerts with video cameras and waved.

Five feet away, on the other side of the paneling, the headboard knocked out its rhythm. My parents’ voices blended together, low and urgent, full of pain.

I figured that before too long I’d get a dog to go with the kitten my dad had brought home out of the blue the week before.

Before too long, everything would be perfect.

It didn’t last, though. It never lasted. He argued with my mom, and she didn’t manage to calm him down. He kept harping on how much she’d spent on some shirt she bought. The fight escalated into a tirade about her nagging, her neediness, what a useless fucking burden we both were.

He got behind the wheel drunk, backed out into the road with a spray of gravel, and jerked the car forward so fast he ran over the kitten.

He stopped then. I threw myself to my knees beside the car. He got out, and both of us looked.

That poor fucking kitten. I couldn’t stop staring at it. My mom was standing against the door, crying like she was the one he’d run into, while I watched the kitten try to breathe with its chest crushed.

I thought we were united. I thought he was looking at the kitten the way I was, trying to breathe for it, soaked in remorse and confusion and a desperate, unraveling kind of hope for its rescue.

I kept thinking that. Right up until he hauled off and kicked it.

It wasn’t even dead, but he kicked it hard enough to send it sailing on a low arc, inches above the ground. It rolled through the gap in the neighbor’s trellis, coming to a stop underneath, too far underneath the trailer for me to reach.

It would rot there. I didn’t know that yet.

“Quit crying,” he said. “It’s just a fucking cat.”

When he got in the low-slung car, pulled the door handle shut, and drove away, I didn’t hate him. I blamed my mom for all of it—the argument, his anger, the kitten.

I didn’t hate him, but I understood for the first time that he and I aren’t the same.

He’s the kind of man who would kick a kitten.

I’m not.

My mom doesn’t seem to get that. This morning she sent me a text that said, Happy Valentine’s Day to the love of my life!

I held the phone in a tight grip. It was either that or fling it across the room.

The love of her life.

When she’s with my dad, she calls him that. Wyatt Leavitt, the love of her life. Her sweet man. Her wanderer.

“There’s nothing like passion,” she told me last time she took him back. “You wouldn’t understand, Westie, you’re too young, but passion is what we’re made for. Without it …” She shrugged, cast her eyes at the ceiling, searching for the right words. “Without it, we’re just animals.”

This about a man who’s gut-punched her. A man who split my lip when I tried to protect her because he was smacking her around, calling her names, slapping her silly while she cried and begged him not to, not to hurt her so bad, “Please, honey, don’t.”

The love of her life.

And I look just exactly fucking like him.

The hostess, Jessica, sticks her head through the door. “Sixteen’s ready for the check, eight’s stacked the menus up by the edge of the table, and I took a dessert order for you on twelve. If you don’t get back out there, I’m telling Sheila to fire you.”

“Coming.”

I open the outside door, drop the half-finished cigarette on the concrete step, and grind it out under my shoe.

Jessica waits until she actually sees me moving before she heads for the front.

I take the check to table sixteen, get table eight’s order, deliver dessert to twelve. Then I check on my other tables. The whole time, my mother’s words are drilling a hole between my eyebrows.

The love of my life.

I’ve dedicated almost ten years to trying to be the man my father should have been but isn’t. A man who will put the family first, no matter what. Keep them safe, keep them fed, keep them happy.

I never wanted to be her love. Her kind of love—it makes you weak. It drags you under.

But tonight, more than any of the past twenty-two nights I’ve spent without Caroline, I can’t help thinking there’s more than one way to drown.

Another waiter passes me and says, “Jessica just gave you six.”

“Thanks.”

When I take the water pitcher over, I find my econ teacher at the table. A plump woman, she once brought along four kids and a bag of powdered-sugar doughnuts to a study session and let them go to town. She’s with her husband tonight, dressed up nice. She shows me off a little. “One of my best students last semester,” she calls me, and she says she hopes to have me in her seminar next year.

I take their order and wish them a happy Valentine’s Day.

I like her, so I make an effort to uncurl my lip when I say it.

Back in the kitchen, I put the order in and pick up appetizers for another table, a four-top. I push through the kitchen door with a plate in each hand, two more balanced on my forearms, thinking about another dinner with another woman old enough to be my mother.

Two years ago on Valentine’s Day was the first time I ever set foot in the Tomlinson house. Mrs. Tomlinson had a candlelight dinner prepared at the resort kitchen, and she said she’d pay me two hundred bucks if I played waiter for a couple of hours.

I served the food and stood in the corner where she’d told me to stand, watching them eat—this man who’d taken me under his wing and the woman he married. His love.

This man I wanted so badly to be like, because he had everything I wanted. Respect, money, security, skill.

Mrs. T wore a black dress cut low in the front, her tits half hanging out, diamonds dripping from her ears, down into her cleavage, sparkling on her fingers. She cooed at her husband, talking about their wedding day.

“The happiest day of my life,” she said.

The next week, I fucked her in his bed. She wanted me to take her from behind. I climbed on top of her, did her until she scratched at the sheets, arched her back, came with a yowl like a cat.

I remember holding her hips, pushing into her. A mindless pistoning piece of meat.

No better than an animal.

My mother’s love is a disaster, but I wasn’t doing any better for myself until I met Caroline.

I came to Putnam thinking love was a weakness and sex was a tool. Maybe I was right. I think, with the life I’ve had, I’d have to be some kind of dumb-fuck not to be at least a little afraid of the way I feel about Caroline.

I’ve been worried that deeper is an undertow that will take away my control and leave me as helpless and deluded as my mom. I’ve thought if I let that happen—if I let myself get distracted by Caroline, broke the rules, said fuck it to my common sense—then I couldn’t respect myself, because I’d be no better than my father. No smarter than my mom.

But here I am, hustling steaks and salads and quinoa cakes to one couple after another, smiling and being charming even though I fucking hate this, I hate all of it, I hate everything when I’m not with Caroline, and I’m thinking the whole time, What’s it going to take, a mallet to the head? A neon fucking sign?

I love Caroline. I want her. I want everything she’ll give me, and it’s not going to stop. It’s never going to stop.

And I’m not my father.

I look just like him, but I’m not him. I’ve known that for a long time.

What I need to get through my head, maybe, is that I’m not my mother, either.

I’m not in love with a woman who doesn’t deserve me. I’m not throwing myself at passion like it’s a drug and I need a hit, begging it to take me in, shoot me up, wreck me if it has to.

I waited more than a year to even kiss Caroline, and I had plenty of time before then to learn what she’s all about.

She’s good. She’s smart. She’s fucking fierce.

Honestly, I’m glad she told me off. I was being a dick, and she called me on it. The woman I’m in love with is strong enough to insist I treat her the way she deserves.

I haven’t. I haven’t told her anything about me, my life, my family, my people, because I’ve been afraid she’d use it against me. Pick me apart. Break me open.

But why would she do that? She’s not my father. Not my enemy.

She’s Caroline.

Three weeks without her has taught me the same thing I should have figured out in the eighteen months since I met her: That she’s amazing. That I’m in love with her. That passion feels fantastic.

Loving Caroline hasn’t thrown me off a cliff.

I’m still me. Not my father. Not my mother.

If I get called home, I’m going, because I have to. It’s not negotiable.

I don’t know what’s going to happen before then—not with Caroline and me or with anything, really. I could have to leave tomorrow. I could get bite it in a convenience store holdup. We could all die from fucking bird flu.

But tonight, it’s Valentine’s Day.

If the world ends in the morning, I’m going to do everything I can to make sure it ends with Caroline in my bed, her hair on my pillow, my hands on her ass.

And I mean that in the most romantic possible way.

I’m at her door, a dozen cheap gas-station roses clutched in my hand. I smell like sweat and dishwasher steam, and she’s in her pajamas, her eyes slitted against the brightness of the hallway.

I woke her up.

I woke Bridget up.

If I stand here long enough, I’ll probably wake up half the hall, and I don’t give a fuck.

“What do you want to know?”

“What?” Her voice is thick with sleep.

“Tell me what you want to know. Ask me a question, I’ll answer it. I’m an open book.”

Her hair’s all snarled at the crown of her head. I want to smooth it down, kiss her, take her in my arms.

Too soon. Too soon, even if this works out. And if it doesn’t … I can’t think about that.

“You’re an open book,” she repeats. She must be waking up, because she injects some skepticism into the words.

“Anything you want to know.”

“Let’s start with why you’re here at—what time is it?”

“Eleven thirty-five.”

“At eleven thirty-five at night on Valentine’s Day”—and here she kind of eye-rolls at the bouquet in my hand—“when you haven’t called me or texted me or given the least sign you remember I’m alive in almost a month.”

“Twenty-two days.”

“You’re counting?”

“I can tell you how many hours if you want.”

“Because …”

“Because when it comes to you, I’m a fucking moron. More than you know. Probably in a bunch of ways you don’t have a clue about.”

That almost makes her smile. I can see her lips twitch. She decides not to allow it, but lip twitching is a good sign, so I barrel on. “Look, I didn’t mean to wake you up. I would’ve come sooner, but I was on at the restaurant, and there was this couple who came in right before ten and stayed for fucking ever, so this was the soonest I could get here. I guess I should have come tomorrow, but …”

… but I couldn’t stand it anymore.

… but I needed to see you.

… but once I made up my mind, I didn’t want to wait even four seconds longer than I had to.

“I brought you roses.” I hold them out, the only gift I’ve ever given her, blood red and, I hope, so cheesy she has to like them.

“I see that.”

I wait for her to say something more, give me a clue how I’m doing here. She scrubs her hands over her face—something I’ve seen her do a hundred times at the bakery to wake herself up.

“Okay,” she says. “Okay, Mr. All-of-a-Sudden-I’m-an-Open-Book. Where are you from?”

“Oregon.”

“What town, idiot.”

“Silt.”

“You’re from a place called Silt?”

“Yes.”

“What’s it like there?”

“It’s close to Coos Bay, which is on the ocean. Coos is pretty—they get tourists. Silt is farther inland. It’s kind of …” A shithole. “There’s not much to it.”

“So do you have parents, or are you, like, the product of spontaneous generation?”

She’s teasing, but not really. My family’s a sore spot between us, and she’s pushing right into it. “Everyone has parents, Caro.”

Bridget says from somewhere in the darkness, “Don’t forget, you can slam the door on his foot.”

I think about pulling my foot back, but I’ll risk it. “I’ve got a mom. My dad’s … not around. Most of the time. Which is much better for everybody involved. He’s … bad news.”

She meets my eyes, a slight pucker between her eyebrows. Fully awake now—this is how she looks in class. Listening hard enough to hear everything I’m not saying in between the things I am. “What’s her name?”

“My mom? Michelle.”

“Is she married to your dad?”

“No.”

“So is she the Leavitt, or … ?”

“It’s my dad’s name.”

“Any more brothers and sisters?”

“Just Frankie. I told you about her.”

“No, you didn’t.”

Fair enough. “I will.”

She tilts her head, thinking. “What’s your favorite color?”

“Green.”

“Best place you’ve ever been on vacation.”

“We never went anywhere. California, I guess.”

“Best present you ever got.”

“That book you gave me.”

Her eyes widen a fraction. “It’s just a book. About bread.”

“I liked it.”

“What kind of presents do you usually get?”

“Clothes. Stuff I need. Shit my mom thought was funny but isn’t particularly. Bo gave me a fifth of whiskey at Christmas.”

“Who’s Bo?”

“My mom’s boyfriend. She and Frankie live with him.”

“Why did you dump me after break?”

I’m not expecting the question. My eyes flick to the darkness past her shoulder. “Do you think … if I promise to tell you anything you want, will you come back to my place?”

She doesn’t answer right away. Instead, she plucks the flowers out of my hand, peels back the clear plastic and tissue paper around the top, and studies them. “If this is just a cheap attempt to get laid on Valentine’s Day, it’s not going to work.”

“It’s not that.”

After a long moment, she looks up.

I’ve seen her face a hundred ways. Cautious and hopeful, brave and fierce, happy and crying. I’ve seen her soft and open, her mouth thoroughly kissed. I haven’t seen her look like this but once: that first night when I walked out to her car and invited her into the bakery.

Scared. She’s scared of what’s going to happen.

But she wants it anyway.

“What is this, then?” she asks.

I wish I could think of something perfect to say. I wish I had words that took in her and me, eighteen months of watching and waiting, nights I’ve lain awake, midnights we’ve passed together mixing dough and making each other laugh. Every dream I’ve had about her. Every time I heard her voice or got a text that made me smile or shake my head. Every night I held the phone to my ear and said whatever I could think of to make her squeak and moan and fall apart.

With all the ways I know her, I still don’t know how to make her understand how I can be standing here, completely unsure what it is I’m doing, where we’re headed, what this is—and how I can still be so positive this is where I belong.

She’s what I want. More than my plans, more than I want to be smart, more than I want to follow the rules—I want to be with her.

I need to. I have to. I want to.

I can’t waste any more time trying to figure out which of those it is. Not when I doubt we have all that much time left to waste.

“I want to be your boyfriend,” I blurt out.

Immediately I wish I’d thought of another way to put it. I want to be your boyfriend—worse than lame. Childish. The words drop into my gut, leaden.

I’ve never said them before.

Caroline is looking right at me, those big brown eyes full of interest and … sympathy, maybe.

Fuck it all, she feels sorry for me.

Too late. You waited too long.

But her mouth is soft, and so is her voice when she says, “Hang on a second.”

I wait in the doorway, a hook tied to a line held in Caroline’s hand. Just waiting to see where she’ll drag me.

Keys jingle. She comes back with her coat and the lanyard she uses as a key chain dangling from her fingers. Her boots are by the door. She shoves her feet into them, yanking them over her pajama pants. “Don’t wait up, Bridge,” she says, and moves through the door, closing it behind her, jiggling the handle to make sure it’s locked.

She’s coming with me.

She turns around, her face close to mine, her body close, the flowers pressing into my coat, rustling and crinkling.

“Am I driving?”

I just stare at her. I haven’t got a clue what I said to get this lucky.

Maybe she’s a gift. The universe paying me back for my dad being such a hopeless shithead.

I’ll take it.

“West?”

“Is … is that a yes?”

Her shoulders lift and fall with another plastic crinkle. “Do I ever tell you no?”

“You did once.”

She smiles—her smile like the pink and orange at the horizon when I walk out of the bakery into the alley and get surprised by the morning.

I’ve been in the dark. I’ve been solitary, single-minded in pursuit of a life that felt like it might be enough—until she walked into it and it wasn’t.

Deeper or nothing. My new motto.

“I didn’t tell you no,” she says. “I told you to make up your fucking mind. And look!” She waves the flowers in my face. “It worked. Now I’m being wooed.”

“That’s what you wanted, huh?” I smile. “Some good old-fashioned wooing?”

“Maybe it’s some of what I wanted.”

I lean in, on solid ground at last. “I’ll woo you until you can’t walk, sweetheart.”

“Promises, promises.”

She closes her eyes when I kiss her, but I keep mine open.

I want to watch the sun rise.

I think it’s supposed to be awkward—walking to her car, the night cold enough to freeze my balls off. Driving to my apartment with the heat blasting and quiet all around us.

We go up the fire escape, leave our shoes by the door, pass through the common area into my bedroom. I hang my coat over my desk chair and sit down on the bed, legs stretched out, back against the wall.

She considers for a moment, then does the same thing.

We’re side by side on my bed, and I keep waiting for it to go wrong, to feel wrong, but all I can feel is relief, if relief feels like walking with nothing dragging behind you after you’ve been towing a trailer of misery around for most of your life.

I turn a little so I can look at her.

Her hair’s still all screwed up. She’s got crud at the inside corner of one eye, and her bottom lip has a raised elliptical pad on it like you get when your lips are too dry because of the weather or because you’ve been biting them.

Which she does, while I watch. She catches her lip between her teeth, sucks it into her mouth, releases it with grooved white lines that pink up as I watch.

I want to devour her.

I’m pretty sure it’s not time yet.

“You have to tell me what you need me to do now,” I say. “I mean, you want to talk, but I’m not sure … I’m complete shit at this.”

It’s another kind of relief, it turns out. To be shit at it, and to just be able to say so.

“This being, what? Girls?” She’s smiling.

“Yeah, you’d love for me to admit that.”

“It would make me pretty happy to hear you say you’re shit with girls, yeah.”

“You didn’t used to have any complaints about my skills.”

“But that was, like, a practice environment. Make-out homework.”

“You’re saying I might be the kind of person who can’t hack it in a real-world application.”

She turns toward me, resting her shoulder against the wall. “I’m saying I have a feeling you’ve never had a girlfriend before.”

“That’s true,” I tell her. “I’ve been with girls but I’ve never—”

I think about how to put it, and I start to tie myself up in knots before I remember that it’s just Caroline and me. I get more than one shot at putting it right if it comes out wrong the first time.

“You’re the first girl I ever cared about this way.”

I thought admitting that to Caroline would be like taking a piece of myself and handing it to her.

It is.

And it isn’t.

It’s more like … like there’s all this stuff I’ve packed into myself, a defense against what I’m afraid of. Rocks and dirt, bits of rebar and junk that I’ve found by the roadside. And what I’m giving her isn’t me, it’s a clawed-off piece of this barrier that I’ve gotten used to thinking of as me.

I don’t need it. Not to keep me safe from her.

She’s smiling, looking down at her hands where they’re laid out on the bed. Just an inch or so from my hands. She nudges her fingers over until they overlap the tips of mine. “You know what the magic word was, at my room?”

“No, what?”

“Boyfriend.” She glances at my face, then back down. “That’s why I came with you. Because you said that.”

“I should’ve said it a long time ago.”

I mean it, too. I wish I’d been able to. I wish I hadn’t wasted every night I might have been able to spend with her. “Friend. Boyfriend. You deserved both.”

She reaches up to touch my face. Her fingers stroke over my forehead, past my temple, over my cheekbone, curling into a loose fist so she can skate her knuckles over my mouth. “You’ll really tell me anything?”

“Yeah.” The word is a whisper, the movement of my lips against her skin.

“If I asked you why you got so upset when I gave you that money at Christmas …”

God damn. Way to pick a woman who goes for the throat.

“Yes. If you asked me.”

She sits, watching me for a moment.

“If I asked you why you came out to my car that night at the bakery?”

I nod and turn her hand over. Kiss her palm. It’s corny, I guess, but I’m just so fucking happy she’s here.

“How many … partners you’ve had.”

I kiss her wrist. “Yes.”

“How you feel about me.”

“Yes.”

But I think maybe she knows that already. I think it’s there when I look at her, when she looks at me. If it wasn’t already there, we wouldn’t have lasted so long. We wouldn’t have put each other through so much when it would’ve been easier to just not.

I like her, and I love her, and I want her.

If she asks, I’ll tell her.

For now, though, because I want to and she’s staring at my lips, I kiss her neck. I find her pulse and pause there, lick it, imagining the rush of blood and heat at her throat. Flattering myself that her heart’s beating faster because of me.

I keep thinking she’s going to stop me, but she doesn’t, so I kiss all along beneath her jaw, behind her ear. I kiss her eyelids and her nose, her cheekbones, her chin.

I get my hand at the base of her spine, press up so she’ll lift her hips, ease her down onto the bed.

I kiss her mouth.

She tastes like everything I’ve been starving for.

I keep on kissing her, and she keeps letting me. Her arms sneak around my back and rake down my spine. I’m over her, hips centered above hers, hard against soft. I didn’t plan this, but her lips shape the welcome I’ve been waiting for my whole life, her arms are the anchor I need, her body is my home.

We’re right together, Caroline and me. Even if I’m doing this wrong, completely fucking wrong, it doesn’t matter.

We’re right.

“Tell me what you need me to say.”

There has to be something. I can’t just get to kiss her. Nothing in my life is this simple.

She pushes me away and sits up. I follow her, think she’s going to start making demands now. Insist on the answers to all the questions from a minute ago, which, okay, some of them aren’t pretty. The answer to that first question, in particular, might mean she never wants to kiss me again, and doesn’t that mean I have to tell her?

Does it? I’m not sure.

Caroline reaches down for the hem of her shirt, pulls it over her head, and throws it on the floor.

She’s not wearing a bra.

Fuck, this isn’t fair. I’m already having trouble with the ethics of the situation. I can’t think about right and wrong while Caroline’s tits are exposed, her nipples puckering in the cool air, her arms an open invitation.

“I should … We should. You know. Talk. If you want to?”

“I’m good. But you’ve got too many clothes on.”

She unbuttons my dress shirt, working from the bottom while I hold on to her waist and gawp at her like I’ve never seen a naked woman before. There’s just something different about Caroline. There always has been.

She takes her fingers off my buttons to snap them right in front of my eyes. “Up here.”

I blink and shake my head, breaking the spell. “Sorry.”

“And here I thought you missed me.”

I kiss her forehead. “I did.”

She yanks the last button free and says, “Off.”

“You sure?”

She goes up onto her knees, so she’s taller than me. Puts her hands on my shoulders, stares me right in the eye. “All I needed to hear was that you’d tell me. That you trust me.”

“I always trusted you.”

“No. You can’t keep everything to yourself and still call it trust. Take off your shirt.”

I shrug out of my button-up but hesitate on the T-shirt. I worked a long shift, and I had to hustle. “I stink.”

She casts her eyes at the ceiling and grabs my hem, so I lift my arms above my head and let her pull the shirt off me. When I open my eyes, her breasts are in my face, and I don’t see that I have any choice in the matter. I have to touch them.

God, she’s so fucking soft. I hold them, testing the weight in my hands. I haven’t forgotten the taste of her, the pressure of her nipple against the roof of my mouth. When she moans, I knock her over and fall on top of her, going after her with no art or plan or restraint. Sucking and licking, molding and squeezing, rubbing myself against her thigh, between her legs, over her hip bone, like a stupid kid.

Which is what I feel like. Young and dumb and lucky.

She’s just as bad, grabbing at me in fistfuls—hands in my hair, on my ass, gripping my hip, raking up my back. And still I make one more half-assed attempt to talk to her. “Listen, about the questions—”

She rubs the heel of her hand up and down my cock, and my jaw goes slack. My brain goes slack. All the tension in my body is busy flooding to where her hand is working me over.

“Later,” she says.

Later works for me.

She urges me onto my back and straddles me, centering herself over my hard-on, rubbing back and forth and swaying her tits in my face. I’m the luckiest guy alive.

I suck her and she rides me. Her skin’s so pale, one nipple swelling and softening, darkening as I twist the other between my fingers. Her eyes are closed, her throat mottled pink, her body rising and falling in a slow, even rhythm I can hardly bear. It’s been too long since I came. The first few days after she walked out of my room, I was seething with misplaced resentment. I whacked off like I was planning to make a profession of it. But after a while I lost interest, lost heart.

I’m out of practice.

Which is another way of saying I have the stamina of a fourteen-year-old.

I grab her hips and hold her still. She whimpers and rocks.

“Don’t. Baby. Seriously.”

“It feels good.”

“I know. A little too good. You keep that up, I’m gonna …”

She pulls at my wrists until I let go, puts them on her tits. “Go ahead.”

“You want me to come in my pants?”

Her eyes drift closed. When I thumb her nipples, she sucks in a breath like I’m hurting her, and it’s really, really good. Then she bears down on me even harder.

“Caro, I mean it.”

“I mean it too,” she says.

“It’ll be messy.”

“You have to wash those pants, anyway.”

“Yeah, but still.”

“I’ll clean you up. With my tongue.”

That’s the end of the conversation. My whole upper body breaks out in goose bumps—a sure sign I’ve only got seconds left. I get my hand behind her back, draw her down, stick my tongue in her mouth, and I’m kissing her when my toes curl and I have to throw my head back, close my eyes, the head of my cock unbearably sensitive, tingling fluttering clamping tightness moving up, out of me, hot against my skin, slick and slippery as she slows, kissing my neck, mouthing over my collarbones.

Jesus. Jesus.

I put my hand on the back of her head, and she giggles, tucked into the hollow between my shoulder and my neck. “That was an interesting noise.”

“Shut up.”

“Like you were dying.”

“Swear to God.”

“It didn’t sound pleasant.”

“It was pleasant. Never doubt it.”

She’s shaking against my chest, my arms wrapped tight around her.

“We’ll do you in a minute.” I sound like I’m under water. “Then we’ll see who’s laughing.”

That sets her off again, and I watch her, smiling, because we’re ridiculous.

Ridiculous and happy.

Me and Caroline.

After I catch my breath, it starts to sink in that I’m a dickhead.

Like, literally. I just let the head of my dick call the shots. Genius.

I rub my hand up and down Caroline’s back. She’s tense, her muscles twitching and tight.

“How close were you?”

She breathes a little laugh. “Um, close?”

If I was her, I’d be annoyed. First she gives me an ultimatum and I ignore her for three weeks, then I wake her up, coax her back to my apartment, and don’t even get her off?

“I suck.”

She props herself up on my chest and smiles. “I don’t know, I was kind of enjoying how completely useless you got there at the end.”

“I bet.”

“No, seriously. You’re always so in charge. You’ve made me come, like, a million times, and I’ve only …” She gets bashful, looks away.

“I like making you come.”

Caroline shifts to the side and gives my chest a shy smile. She strokes her hand over my chest, down my stomach. “I like making you come, too. A lot.”

“You sound surprised.”

“I didn’t always like it. Before.”

I’d guessed as much.

“It wasn’t—it wasn’t bad, really. It just wasn’t …”

“Like this.”

“Yeah.”

Her fingers find the button on my jeans. “So I said a minute ago that I’d, uh, clean you up.”

“You don’t have to.”

“But if I want to.”

“If you want to, knock yourself out.” I catch her chin, tip up her face so I can see her eyes. “But if you don’t want to—tonight, or if you’re still coming around next week or in a month, and you don’t want to then, either—that’s fine. I mean, I know you love lists and schedules and all that shit, but there’s not, like, a list of stuff we have to do or some timetable we have to do it on. Where we are now … it’s good.”

I laugh at myself. Good. “Okay, it’s fucking awesome.”

She pushes her nose into my neck and kisses me there. Not the kind of thing I ever would’ve thought I wanted a girl to do, but Caroline can do it all night long if she wants. It’s nice. Like when Frankie used to wake up in the middle of the night and crawl into my bed, all warm and soft. Comfortable.

“Thanks,” she says.

“Don’t thank me. We already established that I’m a dick.”

Her arm tightens around me. “You’re not. You’re great. I mean, you’re kind of also a dick. But mostly great.”

She’s quiet for a minute, and I’m thinking about how right I feel with her and how I’ve never had this with anyone else. Never let any girl this close.

I’m glad it’s the same for her. I know that makes me a jerk, because it means everything that happened to her with Nate had to be kind of shitty in order for her to come to me and think what we’ve got is anything different—anything special at all.

But I’m glad anyway.

I want everything with Caroline to be special.

After a while, her hand starts meandering down my stomach, and she unbuttons my slacks and lowers the zipper. I lift my hips to help her peel them off. She slips the pad of one finger underneath the waistband of my briefs and follows it across my stomach, which makes me suck in a breath.

I could go again. Soon.

“Take these off,” I say, grabbing a fistful of her pajama pants.

She does, while I take off my briefs. She’s a little shy about it, and she leaves her panties on. They’re purple, with dark purple lace at the top.

“Nice,” I tell her.

That makes her smile. She shoots a nervous look at my crotch and starts to maneuver her way down there, but I grab hold of her armpit and haul her back up so I can kiss her. She’s pressed against me, skin to skin, nothing but a tiny scrap of panties separating us. I kiss her slow and lazy, knowing how lucky I am and wanting to soak in it for a good long time.

When she finally pulls her mouth away, I’m hard again, and she’s squirmy, pressing herself into me.

She starts to kiss her way down my chest.

“Let me get you off,” I say.

“I promised.”

I can only see the top of her head, and I can’t tell if she means that funny or serious.

“You don’t have to,” I remind her.

“Shh.” She takes her time getting down there, and the way she does it … Jesus. All those shy glances, somehow I got thinking she didn’t know what she was doing, but by the time she puts her tongue on my cock, one quick swirl around the head, I’m already half dead.

“Tease,” I choke out.

She grins. Sticks out that pointed pink tongue of hers. Licks me clean.

I keep my hands fisted in the blankets so I won’t put them in her hair. Caroline and me have messed around a lot, but tonight’s different, and I don’t want to fuck it up. Traumatize her or whatever. She can do whatever she wants to me, but I’m not going to push her.

It’s fucking hard, though. To keep still. To keep from showing her exactly what I want her to do to me. She wraps her fingers around the base of my cock, and there’s this spot where she could put pressure and doesn’t. She licks and sucks the underside where I’m so sensitive, but she flicks right over the place beneath the head that makes me insane.

I give up on the blankets and rub my hands over her shoulders, up her neck, into her hair. Not clutching at her, though it takes a monumental effort not to. Just touching her.

She cups my balls, but her fingers are so gentle, her mouth so … polite. It’s nice.

It’s good.

She lifts up her head. Crawls up until she’s a couple of inches from my face. “Hey.”

“What?”

“You don’t come with a guidebook. Tell me what you want.”

“You’re doing great.”

I jerk off the bed before I understand why. She pinched my nipple, twisted it. Not in a cute way.

“The fuck? That hurt!”

“Tell me what you want.”

Her eyes are intent, her mouth set in this no-nonsense line. She looks like classroom Caroline, sure of herself, ticked at me for keeping her from completing this lesson to her satisfaction.

I love her like this.

“Suck me,” I say. “Hard.”

She smiles this little smile. Totally satisfied with herself. “Thank you.” Her head drops down again. “Now, keep talking to me, or I’m going to drive home and you’ll be all alone with your right hand. Or is it your left, since you’re left-handed?”

I don’t think I’m supposed to answer the question. Not when she’s crawling down my body, ass in the air. I want my hands on that ass. Get her turned around, pussy in my face, dripping all over me while she sucks me off.

I’ve said shit like that to her on the phone, when I was too far gone to stop myself, safe because I was a couple thousand miles from her. But it’s different to think about saying it to her face. Does she like that, or does she just put up with it? Where do girls like Caroline draw the line?

When she wraps her hand around me, I reach down, show her where to pull the skin tight. “Here.”

She takes over. Then she’s licking me again, flicking her tongue over the head, sucking me into her mouth. Sucking hard.

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

She pops me out of her mouth long enough to say, “That’s more like it.”

There are no girls like Caroline. Just Caroline.

She’s more than enough.

She sucks me, licks me, tongues me in the spot I show her until I’m lifting off the bed, my legs stiff, my dick so hard I can’t possibly last. When she goes for my balls this time, I show her where to stroke behind them, where to press—oh, fuck, she’s a quick study.

“Turn around,” I say, but I’m not sure she understands me. Not sure I can make words that actually come out sounding like English.

“Caroline. I—can you—gnuh.”

“Eh?” she teases.

I sit up, grab under her arms, haul her up my body. Her lips are shining, wet, and I kiss her, get my tongue inside her, get my hand in her panties and my fingers into her slickness. She’s slippery, soaking. God damn.

She moans into my mouth. “West.”

“Turn around,” I tell her.

“What?”

“Turn around. Get your hips up here”—I tug her toward my face—“and your mouth back down there.”

“That’s … Can’t we just have sex now?”

For a second I’m dumbfounded. When I manage to gather a few brain cells together, I say, “Honey, we are having sex.”

Her cheeks are already pink, but now they turn red. Which is hilarious. I mean, I’ve got my fingers inside her, she’s riding my hand, still moving in this soft up-and-down even as we’re talking, hair all loose around her shoulders, fucking beautiful—and now she’s going to get shy on me?

“What did you think this was?” I ask.

“I know. I mean, yes, I’ve heard Quinn’s sex-doesn’t-have-to-include-a-dick lecture, too. But I meant, you know, were we going to have sex sex. Penis-in-vagina sex. Sex.”

I raise an eyebrow. “Penis-in-vagina sex?”

“Shut up.”

“No, I mean, that’s romantic. That’s probably the most romantic proposition I’ve ever heard.”

She’s laughing. “Shut up.”

I move my fingers and push her onto her back. Look deep into her eyes. Say, real serious, “Caro, I would love to have penis-in-vagina sex with you.”

She smacks my arm, and then I kiss her, and then … damn. It’s like we’ve been playing around and now we’re not. At all. The kiss gets intense, fast, her hands are everywhere, grabbing at me, positioning my hips where she wants me, where I’m grinding against her. Her panties are in my way, and I’ve had enough of that. I yank them down, pull them off her ankles, push her knees apart and lick between her legs until she’s making these quiet, helpless sounds that I fucking love.

“West,” she says.

Yeah. I know. She wants me inside her, and if I don’t get there in the next thirty seconds, the world might as well end.

“Hold on. Don’t move. Not one inch.”

I get up, grab a condom from the desk, rip it open, and roll it on with my eyes on Caroline on my bed, legs spread open, wet and ready, her body, her mouth, her smile, her eyes.

“I’m getting cold.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Then I’m back over her, my dick sliding over her warm, soft pussy, our mouths meeting, her arms around me. “You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

I reach down. Find the right spot, the right angle.

I ease into her. Inch by inch. Slow, because I don’t want to hurt her, because it’s been a while for both of us, because I don’t want to embarrass myself and come before we’re even hardly started.

Slow, because I want to watch her face, and, fuck, it is romantic. It is special.

It’s Caroline.

When I’m all the way in, her knees spread wide, her eyes right with me, I kiss her. I just stay there, not moving, because I’ve wanted to be here, with her, for so long, but I didn’t think I ever would.

It’s torture. The worst best torture of my life.

This is what deeper feels like.

This is what sex feels like, if you’re doing it right.

If you’re in love.

It’s incredible.

I frame her face between my palms, smooth her hair off her forehead. “You okay?”

I thought this couldn’t get better, but it does when she smiles. And when she moves, rocking her hips experimentally into me, then back away—Christ Jesus. I suck in a breath and close my eyes.

“I’m great.”

“Good.”

I’m not ready to move yet. I’ve been told I have amazing stamina, but it’s obvious now that this is only true when I don’t give a shit. With Caroline, I’m going to have to work hard just to not be the king of the premature ejaculators.

“West?”

She rocks again.

“Hunh?”

“Are you going to fuck me or what?”

“I ever tell you I don’t like bossy women?”

She slithers away beneath me, then thrusts up. Her mouth falls open in a soft O. Then she smiles and looks at me, like, I’m such a genius.

She does it again. “You—oh—like me, though—oh my God.”

Whatever tiny piece of control I was holding on to, I lose it. I start to move, and she’s right with me. I suck her tits, kiss her neck, behind her ear, everyplace she likes. I drive into her, savoring every stroke, the tight clasp of her cunt, the way she moans, the slide of our bodies, the sex stink better than any perfume, the taste of sweat at her throat.

“Can you come like this?” I ask.

“I don’t … know.”

I get a hand under her ass, angle her up. She squeaks.

“Better?”

“Oh, wow.” After a few seconds, she says, “Harder.”

Music to my ears.

I speed up, stop banking my thrusts, let her have more of my need, more of my greed, and she takes it. She wants it. She gets her legs around me, digs her heels into me on every stroke, lifts up into me, and says, “West, yeah, oh, God.” I didn’t think she’d be like this, this open, this loud, but she is and I love it.

“This gonna work?”

I don’t have to ask, though. She’s tossing her head, heels back on the bed, digging in, getting restless and desperate. “Please,” she says. “Please.”

She always begs me when she’s about to come. I love that, too. I love making her so crazy that she loses her pride and just begs.

“So fucking sexy.”

Then we’re moving fast and frantic, and I don’t have any way to describe it that’s worth anything. I push into her until there’s nowhere to get to, until I’ve already got there, and there’s no her or me, just us, our bodies, our heat, this gathering pleasure white-hot and dangerous, too dangerous, but I don’t care. I can’t think.

I can only move with Caroline, deep, deeper, all the way toward the center of something bigger than either of us.

She tightens. I groan. She grips me. I kiss her.

She moans and her voice breaks, a beautiful cracked-open sound. My balls tighten, the joy searing through me, her eyes closing, her arms clenching, my heart open as I watch her light up with pleasure.