Deeper

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?

I’m smart enough to know that to anyone else this would sound like an epically bad idea. Bridget would not approve. My father would have a stroke. The Internet Asshats, predictably, think I’m a sloppy cunt who needs a good dicking, or whatever.

I’m getting kind of bored with the Internet Asshats.

I know what good girls do, and this is not it.

But I put it on my calendar, anyway, fifty minutes twice a week that I round up to an hour and shade in orange because orange feels like his color. WEST, I type.

Bridget and I string Christmas lights around the windows of the dorm room, and I go out to Walmart and buy an extra string to wrap around the posts of the bed and along the edges. When Bridget isn’t home, I turn off the overhead bulb and get under my blanket. The lights glow green and red, blue and yellow and orange.

I close my eyes, skim my fingers over my skin, thinking of West.

I have never been so excited.

He shows up right after his class. Knocks twice, then just opens the door and lets himself in. He’s got that coat again, and a textbook and notebook under one arm. He won’t quite meet my eyes.

“I was thinking,” he says, with no warm-up.

Uh-oh.

“I don’t want this to … hold you up. So I think we should agree, we’re only doing this until—until you feel ready. For something normal.”

“Like … what?”

“Scott. You need to promise me, when you’re ready to go out with Scott, or some other guy like him—some guy who wants to take you to dinner and, like, meet your dad and all that—you’ll tell me. And we’ll quit.”

With West in my room, I find it hard to remember what Scott looks like or why I would ever want anything more than I want this. But I recognize that he’s trying to do the right thing. Some version of the right thing.

I kind of love that about him. He says he’s not noble, but he’s got his own code, and he needs the boundaries, the rules, just as much as I do.

We’re going to do this, but first we’ll box it in and wall it off and find a way to make it acceptable. To make it fit.

“Ooookay,” I tell him.

That out of the way, he unlaces his boots and leaves them by the door. I’ve never seen him with his boots off before. His socks are just ordinary gray socks, and there is no reason they should make me hum with anticipation. No reason at all.

He drops his stuff on my desk, hangs his coat on my chair. He pulls his phone out and sets it on the edge of my desk right by the bed, next to my pillow.

I’m going to have my head on that pillow. West is going to kiss me, and then he’s going to look past me to the desk and see how many minutes we have left.

Fifty minutes seemed like a reasonable amount of time before. Not too long, not too short. Now it seems like an eternity. All I’ve done is kiss him, but no one kisses for fifty minutes.

This is insane.

I glance at West for reassurance, but he isn’t helping. His eyes have found the same magic spot on my floor he stared at last time he was here.

Me, I think. Look at me.

He doesn’t. So I walk to where he’s trained his gaze, find the spot, and step on it.

I step on it because, insane or not, I prepared for this hour. Plugged in the Christmas lights. Put on my favorite dark jeans, a white shirt that’s a little tighter than I’m comfortable with outside the room, a pretty bra. I brushed my hair out, left it down.

I didn’t put shoes on, though. My feet are bare, toenails painted pink, and I want West to see my feet and think about the rest of me naked. I want him to own up to his desire again, although, seriously, how many times does he have to say it before I’ll believe it? The way he grabbed me two days ago, dragged me up his thigh … I get hot flashes just thinking about it.

I get another one now, watching West’s eyes travel up from the floor spot that I’ve obliterated, over my legs, lingering at my hips, my breasts, my lips. That look is back in his eyes, covetous.

He wants to touch me.

It’s just that neither of us seems to know how.

You would think we were both virgins, rather than an Internet naked-picture sensation and … whatever West is. Not a virgin. I’m pretty sure.

Ninety percent sure.

He sits down on the mattress. “Come here.”

I do.

I sit right next to him, thigh touching thigh, and I want to look at his face.

I do look. For fifty minutes, I’m allowed to look. I’m not sure what else I’m allowed to do, but looking is okay.

His face is beautiful. The Christmas lights cast a glow over his skin, blue across his cheekbone, red behind his ear. His eyes, slightly narrowed, seem to glow. The word I think of is avid. Like whatever I’m about to do, he’s going to observe it, lean into it, take it and run with it.

I like being the thing he’s avid for, because that same feeling is inside my skin. The strain of not touching him, a low hum that’s always there, always something I’m pushing down, ignoring.

Only now I don’t have to.

As soon as I think it, my fingertips drift up to touch his neck. I turn my hand over and feel the rasp of his stubble against the backs of my fingers, the bumpy texture that smooths out lower down, until I find a spot where his skin is like hot satin.

“Can I do this?”

What I’m really asking is, How greedy can I be? How much will you give me?

He smiles, a little huff of breath that isn’t a laugh or a judgment, just a pleased noise. “Yeah.”

He draws a line across my chest, above the swell of my breasts. “Above here.”

I inhale and feel the line rise. The wake of his touch.

He strokes down my arm to my wrist. “And here.” He rubs his thumb over my wristbone.

“There?”

“That’s where I’ll touch you.”

“That’s it?”

He looks hard and long at my body. Every part of me that was sleeping comes awake and puts out its arms and says, Come in, come in, come in.

He taps my knee. “From here down.”

I hide my eyes against his shoulder, wanting to grumble. He’s going to skip all the best parts. “Is there a weird, kinky reason for this that I’m not understanding?”

He puts his hand in my hair and lifts my face so I have to look at him. “It’s just … what I want.”

His eyes are cautious, saying this. As if telling me what he wants is the scariest thing he’s done since he opened the door. It makes me certain that he hasn’t always been able to draw lines, hasn’t always set the terms.

It makes me wonder who he’s been with before, and how.

“Do you want me to do the same thing?” I drag my finger across his chest. “Above here.” Down his arm to his wrist, catching on his bracelet. “All along here.” A lingering tap north of his knee. “From here down?”

“You could.” His thigh shifts under my fingers, which have given up tapping in favor of fanning out over the muscle they’ve found. I want to stroke upward, filling the full width of my palm with soft denim and firm warmth until I reach the crease of his hip and have to decide where to go. Map him with my hands. “Or you could just go with the flow and trust me.”

I try to think of something smart to say, or something funny. But those words—trust me—crumple up my confidence and toss it away.

I think, all in a rush, of the reasons I can’t trust. Bad breath and body smells, stuck zippers, biting. The words on the birth-control chart that hangs on the inside door of the bathroom stalls that I’ve meant to look up but never gotten around to. Frottage. Rimming. I don’t know what they mean. I don’t know how many girls West has had sex with, and it seems vitally necessary that I find out so I can compare myself to them unfavorably.

There are condoms in my desk drawer, but they could be the wrong size.

Trust me, he says, and I can’t shut off my brain. Last time we kissed, I was stoned, so it was different. This time I have no defense, no way to hide from how close his eyes are, how much he sees.

It was like this with Nate. Over time I got better about it, but mental flailing was pretty much my constant make-out companion until I figured out that it worked better if I had a few drinks first. Then I tried to plan as many of our sexual encounters as possible for parties.

I’m not sure I’ve ever been kissed at ten in the morning, in the daylight.

I don’t trust it. I don’t trust myself.

“We should have some music,” I blurt.

West sighs.

Then he shoves me.

I’m on my back with West above me, those eyes like smoke, that smart-ass mouth so sure of itself. “Trust me,” he says again, and kisses me.

Then it’s okay.

Way better than okay.

Kissing West is nothing like kissing Nate. His mouth is warm and sure of itself, and it says, Shut up, Caro. Close your eyes. Stop thinking.

Feel.

I do. I can’t not. With West’s mouth on mine, feeling is the only thing I’m capable of.

We kiss. Time passes, and we kiss.

I wish I had words, if only so I could press them into memory. This hot, wet slide of tongue against tongue, soft lips and angled mouths, fitting and refitting. This beautiful pulse, this damp haze, this foggy, hot, yearning ache.

There are more ways to kiss than anyone ever told me, and I want them all.

I get them. I get West, his mouth, his weight, his smell.

We kiss.

The lines we’ve drawn on our bodies aren’t important. They’re just pencil marks we need to put around this thing that’s so big, it could get scary if we let it.

Kissing West is my hands in his hair, on his neck, spanning his shoulders. It’s clutching his back when he plunges his tongue into my mouth, finding his waist, sneaking my hands under his shirt to steal the heat and smoothness of his skin.

It’s his body above me, his chest on me, a heavy crush I can’t get enough of because he’s always been so far away and now he’s here. His palm cradling my head, his fingers curled around my shirt at the shoulder, fisted in a tight grip because they want to wander and he won’t let them.

It’s his pale eyes, a rim of bluish color around huge dark pupils, his eyelashes long and his eyelids sleepy.

It’s the sighing weight of his forehead on mine when he has to breathe.

Lazy heat. Connection. Safety and quiet in a place where I’ve been alone and afraid and the voices in my head have been loud for weeks now. Months. He casts a spell on me, throws me into a gorgeous daze where I could kiss him forever and be perfectly content.

We have fifty minutes.

The thought is fingers snapping in my consciousness. Fifty minutes. How many are left? My lips feel full, bruised, tender and slick. I can’t remember ever kissing this much. Surely I must have, with Nate, in the early months we were dating? But when I think that far back, I mostly remember arguments. We would kiss, and then he would want more and I’d stop him, and he would get distant, huffy, pained.

You don’t know what it’s like, Caroline.

West is carrying his weight on one elbow, his legs and hips off to the side. I don’t know if he’s hard. I haven’t cared, haven’t thought. I’ve been too busy kissing, and I don’t know what it’s like.

Cocktease, the Internet Asshats say, but this time they’re right. I just forgot. I forgot about him.

I break the kiss so I can crane my head around and look at the time on the phone. Ten minutes left. We’ve been kissing for thirty-five, forty minutes, and I haven’t thought. But ten minutes should be long enough, if we need to do something different. Finish West off.

The thought is spiky, uncomfortable.

I ask him, “Are you … ?”

“Mmm.”

He’s mouthing my neck. Paying zero attention to my attempt to question him.

I curl my fingers around the thick leather of his belt. Bring them to the buckle, heavy and threatening.

I pull the leather from the loop.

West’s hand covers mine. “What are you doing?”

“If you’re … you have class, so …”

West rolls away and sits up. He has to duck his head because of the bunked beds. “I have class?”

“I don’t want you to …” I can’t say it. “Forget it.”

He grabs my chin and turns my head and makes me look at him. He won’t let me look away. It’s freaking annoying, and I hate it.

“Trust me,” he says. “I need this to be—need us to do this right. With you talking to me, telling me what you like, nobody trying to just guess or do stuff they don’t necessarily want to. I need it.”

I can’t say no to that. To anything he needs. As much as I hate to, I have to tell him.

“I thought you were maybe uncomfortable. From so much … from kissing me, maybe that was making you … hard, and if we only had a few minutes left before class, I’d better … finish it.”

He sits there, watching me with his eyebrows drawn in. I can’t tell what he’s thinking—if he’s angry or frustrated, confused, or maybe wishing he were somewhere else. With some girl who isn’t such a mixed-up freak.

Then he leans toward me, catches me by the waist, and pulls me into his lap.

He kisses my hair, right by my ear. “He really did a number on you, huh?”

I think about saying, Who? or No, but I’m trembling, and my mouth tastes like battery acid, so, yeah.

Yeah. I guess he did.

“I have to go in a minute,” West says quietly. “I don’t want to. But I have to.”

“I know.”

“I like kissing you, Caro.” He puts his lips to my neck. His arm is wrapped around my back, his hand heavy at my hip. The weight of it—perfect. “You like kissing me?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

His mouth moves down to my shoulder, to the sliver of exposed skin at the neckline of my shirt. To the hollow behind my ear, where his breath makes me shiver. He finds my mouth, and then our lips meet again, hot and wet and perfect, perfect.

“You like that?” His voice is a growl, a low thrum, explicit as fingers between my legs.

“Yes.”

“That’s it, then. You like it. I like it. Beginning, middle, end. There’s no finish. This is the whole thing, right now.”

He’s kissing me again, so I can’t think about whether or not what he said is true. I just wrap my arms around his neck, rake through his hair, outline his ear with my fingertip, and kiss him back. Under the Christmas lights, in our cave. Kisses chasing kisses, hands and mouths.

Everything. Everything.

And then we run out of time. It takes me a second to figure out that the beeping I hear is his phone.

“You set an alarm?”

“Knew I’d never stop otherwise.”

Reluctantly, he pushes me off his lap and reaches for the phone, silencing it. Then he’s standing, adjusting his belt, lacing up his boots.

When he lifts his head, his eyes are sleepy and sexy, his lips stained, color high in his cheeks. Looking at him does something crazy to me, a wet hot clench between my legs, heat spreading outward, upward. I wish I’d gotten his shirt unbuttoned while I had the chance. Seen more of him. Pressed up against his bare skin.

Next time.

God, I hope there’s a next time.

“You coming to the bakery tonight?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

“Cool. I’ll be back Tuesday. If you want me back.”

“Yeah. I do.”

He retrieves his jacket from the couch and puts it on. When his hand is on the doorknob, he says, “For the record, Caro?”

“Yeah?”

“Hard as a fucking rock.”

He slips out the door, and I’m still smiling at it like an idiot when Bridget comes back from class.

Tuesday.

Fifty minutes.

Outside, the sky is dark. It’s snowing, blowing icy slush sideways, gray and miserable. I’ve put on Bing Crosby just to make West shake his head and pretend to lament my terrible taste in music.

His hair is cold and damp, his nose freezing when he presses it against mine, but his lips are warm. His smile is warmer. We have this dim room, this bed surrounded by color, our feet intertwined, his body pushing down on me.

We have slow, deep kisses that keep getting deeper.

I ruck up his shirt and follow the gully of his spine up. The muscles of his shoulders flex under my hands. I scoot down. My shirt hikes up. We kiss and kiss, and I find a way to wiggle until my bare stomach is touching his.

Do you feel this? Your skin and mine?

Because I feel it everywhere.

I want it. I want you.

I skate my palms up his sides. Over his shoulders, into the inner sleeves of his shirt until I run out of room over his hard biceps. His hips move into my thigh, belt buckle nipping into the top of my leg, and I press my fingernails into his skin and scoot down another fraction, seeking better alignment.

Seeking pressure between my legs.

I want the knowledge of what I do to him, the heat of what we do to each other.

When I get there, he grunts and bites my lip. His eyes are slits, his nostrils flared as he breathes in deep, fast. “Caroline.”

I lift into the ridge of heat in his jeans, loving that I can do this to him. Loving the pressure, the weight, the way his kiss gets darker and more desperate and we move together, synchronized.

It’s not sex. It’s better than sex.

It’s West.

Thursday. I wore this shirt—this joke of a shirt. It’s supposed to fall off at the shoulder. It’s supposed to be layered over another shirt, but I didn’t tell him that, and as soon as we lie down to start kissing, it comes off my shoulder and exposes my bra strap and a little bit of my bra.

Red lace.

Come on, West. Be tempted.

Everything is faster this time. His first kiss is hungry, and I’m glad because I’ve missed him, I’ve missed this, I’ve thought of nothing else for two days. His hands have a desperation in them, sliding up and down, into my hair, back to my arms. Starving.

It’s not enough anymore. These limits he drew on my body, the pencil marks faint. I want more. We both want more.

I don’t have to be sneaky in order to get him between my legs. I tug at his belt, and he’s over me, as hard and hot as I remember him but better. So much better. The way he rears up suddenly to look at me. His eyes in this light, keeping no secrets. My stomach is showing, one bra cup half out, and his hands tremble on my wrists as he pulls them overhead and crosses them on the pillow.

I’ve never felt so desirable. It’s a drug in my veins, a giddy ecstasy that makes me grin at him with well-kissed lips. Makes me powerful.

Do something, I order him with my eyes and the small, restless movements of my hips. Do something, or I will.

He sinks down, hair falling in his face, and kisses me again. He thrusts—really thrusts—and my head tilts back. My whole spine arches up, moving into him. I’m wet, and I want his fingers. I want his whole hand inside my jeans, fumbling into my panties. His mouth on my breasts. I want us to round all the bases, one after another, in the next half an hour.

“Please,” I say.

West breathes against my ear. Licks my earlobe. Bites me. “That is not a shirt.”

I grin at the bunked bed above me. “Please.”

He sits up again. “Take it off.”

Gladly. Gladly I do, and then his hands are just … everywhere.

Everywhere. More than once.

My bra hooks in the front. I show him, helpfully, and then the bra is gone and he’s kissing me again, his shark-bit T-shirt so annoying, his warm palm on my breast. Long fingers. Gorgeous, capable, intelligent hands. He knows exactly what to do. Exactly.

“Take this off,” I say, tugging at his hem, so he does, throws the shirt on the floor, comes back down on top of me, skin-to-skin, naked from the waist up—oh, my God, this is the best thing that has ever happened to anyone in the history of the universe. I slide my hands all over his back. He kisses a trail from my mouth to my jaw, down my neck.

He licks my nipple, and I die. I just die.

We are hands and arms, colored light on smooth skin, heat and sweat in the sweltering dorm room. We are kissing mouths, thrusting hips, building tension between my legs.

“Here, this can’t feel good,” he says, and yanks open his belt, pulls it out of the loops, throws it on the floor. He is a cowboy, his belt a whip. It is the sexiest four seconds of action I have ever witnessed.

I miss the pinch of his buckle into my stomach, but not for long. Not for long, because he touches my breasts. He watches me. He figures out what I like, plucks at that tension with his fingers, presses against my clit just right until I’m openmouthed, gasping, embarrassingly wet. It sneaks up on me, unexpected, because I’ve come before with a guy but never from friction, never through my jeans. Never so easy. I don’t recognize this effortless skip from good to great to unbearably amazing, but West must, because he figures out the angles and pushes himself into me in just the right spot, so hard, so perfect, until I’m coming apart against his hardness and his hands and his mouth, oh, God, his mouth.

When the alarm goes off, I’m still catching my breath, and he’s smiling like I gave him a prize.

I think maybe he gave me one. Not the orgasm, either—although the orgasm was great.

The knowledge that it can be so easy.

He does it again before he leaves, with his thigh between my legs and his mouth on my breasts. He’ll be late for class, I think, but I’m limp and my upper lip is sweating, and he licks right over it when he kisses me goodbye.

He pulls his boots back on and rakes his eyes over me, half naked, half dead from pleasure.

I’ve never felt so beautiful.

It’s the shortest fifty minutes of my life.

The end of the semester arrives, and I’m not ready for it. Back in September, it seemed like an impossible goal—to get through the days, to keep my head up, to keep going. I’m not sure when it stopped being impossible, but I know that the difference has everything to do with West.

It’s finals week, which means no class. No schedule, except for a few in-class exams I have to show up for.

No Tuesday and Thursday morning time with West.

Worse, I won’t see him for an entire month. He’s flying home to Oregon. Dad is taking Janelle and her fiancé and me to St. Maarten for Christmas, and then I’ll be hanging around home, waiting for next semester to start. Last year, I spent most of Christmas break with Nate. Now it’s like this yawning void up ahead—nothing to look forward to, and a lot to cringe away from.

Even though we don’t have class, West has work, of course, so I see him at the bakery, the library, and his apartment. Bridget and I have been hanging out with Krishna and Quinn a lot, and with West, too, when he’s around. The five of us are getting to be kind of a unit.

I hadn’t realized how much I missed being part of a group of friends until I had one again. There’s an unpredictability to it, a potential for fun—or at least for conversation, someone to talk to, something interesting to hear about. When it was just Bridget and me, I would see her in all the same places. We had fun, but I think I was sort of a fortress after August, and we were behind the walls.

Now when I walk across campus, I run into Quinn on the quad. She’s trying to talk me into buying rugby shoes. She’s planning a big party for right after break, and she wants me to help her with organizing. Quinn’s been running the rugby club single-handed since the end of last year. I think she wants to recruit me to the dark side.

I walk out of Latin and see Krishna, and he and I head in the same direction, talking about nothing. TV. What his mom sent him in the mail. What he’s up to for Christmas.

The pictures are still out there, but they’re no longer everything I see when I look around. The first report I got from the service I hired is only a page long, miserly about details. I shrug it off, just happy to have it be someone else’s responsibility.

West fills a lot of the space in my head where the pictures used to be. He crowds out my concentration when I’m trying to review my notes at the library. He pushes his cart past, earbuds in, eyebrows lifted in an understated hello.

I get one look at that smirk and I’m a goner, back in my bed, under the lights. Under him.

I can’t concentrate for an hour.

During our usual Tuesday meeting time, I keep glancing at my bed, surprised by how much I miss him. The next night we hang out at the bakery, and I want to touch him, but Krishna’s there, and I’m not allowed, anyway. Not at the bakery. Not in the library. Not where anyone could see.

I sit in my nook on the floor, flipping through my Latin flash cards, and when I look up he’s staring at me from across the table.

He’s got flour on the bridge of his nose. Dusted over his forearms.

He’s got his jeans and boots on, and he’s measuring ingredients, scraping bowls, emptying fifty-pound bags of flour into the wheeled bin. I can’t stop thinking about this scene I saw in a movie once, where the man and the woman had sex with her sitting at the edge of a table and all their clothes still on, just shoved down out of the way.

It certainly wouldn’t be sanitary, but I have a feeling I wouldn’t care.

“What are you up to after this?” West asks.

It’s toward the end of the shift. Krishna has left. He’s done with his finals already, heading home to Chicago for the holiday.

“I’m going to grab a nap, and then I have my English paper to write still.”

“That’s your last thing, right?”

“Yeah. It’s due Friday.”

“You gonna be able to sleep?”

He means because Bridget’s family will be here to pick her up first thing in the morning. Part of her family—her dad and his new wife, plus some stepkids. The room will be a zoo.

“I hope so.”

“You could crash on our couch,” he says. “Write it over at our place.”

“Yeah?”

“Sure. Why not?”

West does the dishes, and I get drowsy. I fall asleep with my head against the leg of the sink, waking once when someone shows up to buy an eighth off West and again later when he drops a pan with a loud clatter.

On the walk to his apartment, I feel drunk. I fall asleep on the couch while he’s taking a shower, barely coming awake when he settles a blanket on me, kisses my temple, and says, “Sleep tight.”

I wake up shivering.

The blanket is a puddle on the floor, the apartment cold. Outside, the snow is blowing, nasty. I think of Krishna in his car and hope he’s okay. But it feels like late morning—he’s probably already home by now.

I reach for the blanket, wrap it around my shoulders, stand up.

I find myself on the threshold of West’s bedroom, still drowsy, looking in at him.

He’s a lump beneath a kids’ comforter, dark blue with rocket ships and planets on it. I asked once if he got it at a yard sale, and he gave me an odd look. “Brought it from home,” he said, as though that’s what we all did. Picked up the comforters off our childhood beds and carried them with us to college.

Everyone else I know works so hard to separate childhood from college, to prove we’re grown up and those years are far in the past. Not West.

It’s not because he’s still a child. I wonder if it’s because he never was.

I can’t imagine West’s childhood. I can’t imagine anything about his life away from here.

There’s nothing much in the room. No decorations. No Christmas lights. No sign that he’s loved or that he loves anything.

It’s not inviting, but it’s Thursday morning. Nine o’clock, according to the display on his alarm clock. I’m barefoot, wrapped in a blue fleece blanket from the couch, and I feel invited.

He invited me.

I walk to his bed and take off my jeans.

I flip back the covers. I climb in behind him.

I put my arm over him, nestling it up beside his arm. Tuck my knees behind his. He’s not wearing pants; his leg hair is ticklish on my thighs, and I wonder briefly if I should be doing this. If he’ll be angry with me for taking a liberty.

But West is the one who made it so we’d be alone, and here we are, on the verge of not being able to see each other for a month.

Mostly I do it because right next to West is where I want to be.

With my head on his pillow, I can feel him breathing, slow and steady. He’s warm and heavy, safe and so dangerously essential.

I close my eyes. He smells like bread and soap.

I drift.

When I wake up, we’ve flipped positions. He’s spooned behind me, and the energy is different.

He’s awake.

All over.

“Caroline.” His voice is low and husky, with an edge to it I’ve never heard.

“Mmm?”

“You’re in my bed.”

“Yeah. You looked cozy.”

“It’s ten o’clock. Thursday.”

I roll to my back. He rolls right on top of me, lifting my arm above my head. Our eyes meet, and then our lips.

The kiss is sleepy, lazy, but insistent. You’re in my bed.

This is how I get kissed if I’m in his bed.

My shirt is just a T-shirt. My bra is boring and white. I could probably use a shower. I have morning breath.

He kisses me like I’m delicious.

He peels off the layers of my clothing as though he’s going to find some fabulous treasure underneath, then strokes his hands over my naked body as if to say, This. This is it. You.

His shirt comes off. He’s gorgeous—tan and flawless, muscular and lean. I lick his biceps. Bite his shoulder. He tastes clean and alive, like everything I want.

In minutes we’re down to his boxer briefs and my panties, and I’m writhing. Actually writhing. It isn’t a thing I knew I was capable of doing, but with West it isn’t even a choice. I have to. Our tongues are at war, my hands on his ass, tugging him closer, closer, always closer.

I’m so wet. Wet through my underwear, I’m sure of it, and the tip of his erection is probing, pushing my panties a few centimeters inside me with the weight of his body and his slow, rolling thrusts. Two thin layers of fabric between us, moist, slippery, insubstantial. Our hips come together in time with our mouths, our tongues, our straining need.

I need him. I need him. I can’t think about anything else. My hands find the waistband of his briefs and slip inside to find the clench of his muscles under my palms.

“Jesus,” he says, with his face against my neck. “Don’t.”

I take my hands away, discouraged. West looks at me. Kisses the wrinkle between my eyebrows, the tip of my nose, my chin, my mouth. “Come on, I didn’t mean it like that. You’re killing me, that’s all.”

“I want to be killing you.”

I want you inside me. Deep. Deeper.

Please.

The words are at the back of my tongue, piled up, and I can’t make myself say them. I can’t ask.

“I want to make you come,” he says.

That would also be excellent.

He strokes his hand up my leg, and I make this sound that’s like a squeak. I guess he likes it, because he kisses me hard. His palm starts over again, sliding from my neck to the cap of my shoulder. It slips over my collarbone to cup my breast and drag slowly over my nipple and then down, down to my waist, to my navel, to the space between our bellies. “I need to touch you.”

“Please.”

He shifts to the side, leaves his thigh slung over mine, his elbow by my arm, his breath at my ear as he caresses my breasts with the back of his hand. Brushes back and forth over my nipples. Traces circles, random patterns, until I’m ready to hurt him because the anticipation is killing me, and I say, “West, please, please,” and he relents. He flattens his hand and slides it slowly—agonizingly slowly—down my stomach. Over my navel. Right to the margin of my panties, which are ridiculous red-and-white-striped cotton with holly berries on them and this cartoon Santa, the least sexy panties I own.

I didn’t know I’d be here, that this would happen. I had no idea what this morning would bring. This cautious lifting up of the elastic. This wicked, knowing, dirty sneak underneath.

I never could have imagined the feeling of West’s hand cupping me. His fingers parting me, tracing the secret shapes of my body, the sound of his voice saying, “Fucking hell, Caro,” like a prayer and a compliment.

He presses his finger inside me. Then another. When he tries three, I whimper, and he finds my clit with his thumb. I arch off the bed, deliciously shocked.

There is a sense in which I’ve done this before, all of it, but it feels brand new and astonishingly different. It feels so good that it hurts, it aches, and I hate it, but not nearly as much as I love it.

“You like that,” he says.

I mewl. Like a cat. And his grin is so smug, I reach up to give him a playful smack, but he changes the angle of his fingers inside me and I end up yanking him closer by the hair, kissing him so hard that our teeth knock together and I bite my tongue. I don’t care. Not with West’s thumb circling my clit, over and over, just a little too hard, which turns out to be how I like it.

Not with his fingers moving in and out of my body, a steady rhythm that fractures me into a thousand desperate, craving pieces.

“That’s my girl,” he says, when I have to turn my face away because I can’t concentrate on kissing, can’t breathe, can’t do anything but buck against his hand, senseless as an animal. “Just like that.”

When I come, it’s terrible. This low gathering tension winds and winds until I think I’ll die, and then I do die, I do, and it feels so amazing that it hurts. West stays with me right through it, watches me, eases me down, and now I can feel the rush of it, the part that’s all pleasure in one big push, a wave, a wake, a wave, until it’s grabbed me everywhere, pulled me in and let me go.

I float.

“Oh my God,” I whisper, when I can speak again. My voice is faint. Sweat has gathered at my elbows, in my armpits, at my temples. The wetness between my legs has spread down my thighs, and I’m conscious of the smell of sex.

Nate called it “that fish smell” once. He joked about it.

Fuck you, Nate, I think faintly, but there’s no rancor in it. I honestly don’t care.

I feel so good.

It wasn’t like this with Nate. I came, but it was a goal that had to be reached. An obstacle to be laboriously climbed toward so that we could move on to the next thing, and then the next. It was never this … this bliss, this shared thing West and I make between us, a natural outcome of our being together rather than the product of our dogged efforts.

“Hey, where’d you go?”

West is propped on one elbow beside me, his hand flat on my stomach, resting. Poor hand, it must be exhausted. I give it a pat, then link our fingers together. He smiles and lets his elbow slide, settling onto the mattress. I’m too tired to do anything but look at him. His face, his chest, his stomach, his briefs, dark gray with their intriguing bulge and an even more intriguing wet spot.

I’ve never touched him there. I’ve been afraid to, always afraid that there are rules and I don’t know them. Like if I wait long enough, someone will give me a book called How To Touch West’s Penis, and I can study it until I’m confident. An expert.

Enough of that. In this bed, this cocoon, I’m allowed to reach out for him. To enjoy the sharpness of his inhale, his lowering eyelids, his lip caught between his teeth.

I’m allowed to trip my fingers down his happy trail, shimmy closer so we’re belly to belly, my breasts pressing into his chest, my hand flat, slipping inside his underwear and investigating what I find.

Hard. Hot. Big—oh my gosh.

“You are like a furnace,” I say, and he laughs.

I think it’s supposed to be a laugh. He sounds like he hurts. I want to make it better.

I tighten my hand and stroke experimentally, watching his face to see if it’s okay. If I’m okay, doing this. It’s not my first go-round on this rodeo, but I don’t want to be inept. I want to give him what he gave me.

When I stroke again, his mouth opens, his head falling back.

Okay, then. That seems to work, so I do it until he makes this noise that I guess, officially, is a grunt, but it’s so sexy I could die. I find the wet spot at the head of his penis, slide my palm over it, slick it downward. West’s hand is there suddenly, rudely shoving past mine, gripping himself tight.

“I’m—do you want me to—”

“You’re perfect,” he says. “Fucking perfect. Keep doing that.”

So I do the same thing a few more times, stroking and spreading, making him slippery. He starts to push up into my hand, hard and then harder, flags of color rising in his cheeks. I love that. I watch him, eager for more signs that he likes it, likes this. I kiss him, wanting to push him off a cliff like he did to me, but he can’t kiss. He’s turned crap at it, I guess because he can’t concentrate.

That makes me smile.

My hand speeds up. His face is hard and fierce and gorgeous.

“Caroline.” He covers his eyes with his forearm, and the hand that’s in his shorts grips mine, guiding me into a rhythm, a grip that’s tighter and more cruel than anything I’d have dared on my own. “Just like that, honey. Don’t stop. I’m gonna come, don’t stop.”

I can’t decide what to watch, so I watch everything. Our hands working together. The head of his penis peeking out between them, his hips lifting off the bed, the helplessness in his face when he comes, wetting our hands, my hip, his stomach. I listen to him groan, feel his body lift up underneath me, dirty and sexy and glorious.

When it’s over, his arm drops down and clamps me tight to his side. His grip on my hand releases, his fingers slack. Face slack. I pull the blanket up over us.

I listen to the wind outside, the snow hitting the window in a thousand tiny taps.

I think about how many pictures I’ve seen on the Internet. Shiny cocks, pinkish-purple heads, spurting semen.

I think of what we just did, West and me. How it would look in a picture.

A picture like that—it could never be more than a shadow of what we did. What we are together. It would only be parts, but the parts aren’t the thing that matters.

It’s all of it. All of West and me. The way it feels.

West is right. Pictures lie. I don’t understand why I didn’t get it before—that it’s not me on the Internet. It’s just some stupid pictures. Some lie Nate is fixated on telling the world.

They’re about him, those pictures. They’re not about me.

“You okay?” West asks.

I’ve never seen his face so relaxed. I kiss the corner of his mouth, and it tips up into a lopsided smile.

“I’m good.”

His smile grows. “You’re not. You’re bad. Bad as the rest of us, Caroline Piasecki.”

I kiss his chin. That smart-ass smile. “I know. It’s more fun than I thought it would be.”

His laugh is as soft as his face. “I better clean this mess up.”

He drops his legs over the side of the bed, walks toward the bathroom, scooping up a pair of jeans along the way. I hear water running. “You want something to eat?” he calls. “I think I have chicken noodle soup. And I brought a loaf home.”

I look at the clock, surprised to see how late it is. Our fifty minutes is up, but there are no alarms going off this time. No walls going up.

“Yeah, that sounds great.”

I burrow down, pull the covers up to my chin, and give myself three minutes to indulge my stupid sappy heart, storing up memories for the lonely weeks ahead.

“I have something for you,” I tell him.

He’s sitting at the edge of the mattress, pulling on his socks. Preparing to go make me chicken noodle soup, which, I have to say, is the hotness. Even though all that’s involved is a can and some water. Hot.

“I don’t need anything.”

There’s tension in the way he shapes the words, and when he glances toward me, his eyes are cautious.

I don’t let it bother me. Maybe West doesn’t get a lot of presents. I sit up and press my breasts against his arm, kissing his neck. “Don’t be a grinch. Hang on, I’ll go get it.”

I walk out into the living room in just my Christmas panties, rummaging through my bag with my ass in the air, putting on a little show because I know he can see me, and I feel so good. So happy.

When I come back, I hand him the book I bought him, wrapped in reindeer paper with a glittery gold bow. He puts it in his lap, reluctant, or maybe waiting for me to give him the card in my hand, so I do that.

He opens the card first, ripping it along the side in a way that causes it to flex inside the envelope and then release, slightly creased, into his palm. The money flutters out. Two hundred dollars in twenties, falling in an untidy pile on top of the book.

“What is this?”

Three words, but the way he says them—I shiver.

Something is wrong.

Something is wrong, and I feel suddenly scared, small. Ashamed to be standing here nearly naked when West is clothed and closed off. When he sounds so angry.

I start looking around the room for my bra. “You were supposed to open the present first,” I tease. “Who starts with the card?”

“I do.”

I’ve managed to locate my bra and I’m putting it on, fastening the hooks, when West’s hand closes around my calf. “Caroline. What is this for?”

He asks the question very slowly and deliberately, leaning on every word. Fury etched into the lines of his face.

I can’t imagine what he thinks I’ve done. Charity? Pity?

“The loan.” And I tell myself not to say more, but I can’t stop talking with his eyes so angry. I babble. “Sorry it’s not more. That’s all I could save in the past six weeks, with Christmas coming. I hope you aren’t one of those people who think a book is a bad present, because I got books for everybody this year. I thought you might like it, though. It’s about the science of bread, and there’s a chapter in there—what?”

He’s softened. The relief in his eyes—in his whole body—is palpable.

“Jeez. West, what did you think it was?”

He doesn’t answer. I wait, and he unwraps the book, flips through the pages. I think if it were in Latin, or blank, he wouldn’t notice. He’s just pulling himself together, and I’m embarrassed to have to stand here and see it happen when he obviously wishes I were somewhere else.

“This is great,” he says, after a long, awkward minute. “Thanks.” A pause. “You don’t have to pay me back.”

“Of course I do.”

He looks up at last. “I’d rather you didn’t.”

I’m not sure how to answer that. I’m so bewildered, but he sets the book down on the bed and puts his hands at my hips. He pulls me in between his legs and rests his face against my stomach.

“Really,” he says. “Just don’t.”

His hands slide over my butt. I’m worried about what happened, but West’s hands are soothing. An effective distraction. As I’m sure he knows.

“I didn’t get you anything,” he murmurs.

“That’s okay.”

“Did I tell you how much I like these panties?”

“These? Why?”

“They’re on you.”

I exhale a laugh. I’m not sure what to do with my hands, so I rest them on top of his head. “I thought you were going to make me soup. That can be my Christmas present.”

He hooks a finger in the elastic of my panties, drags them down, follows his finger with his nose. Inhales.

“I got a better idea.”

I smack his shoulder. One of those smacks that turns into a caress. “West.”

Something happened. I’d like to press him, but the truth is that I’m afraid to, and he’s got his hands inside my underwear now. His palms are big and warm, his breath a tease that makes me think about his tongue and how I’ve never liked getting oral before but how, with West, everything’s different.

With West, I have a feeling, I’m going to like it.

“Come back to bed,” he orders.

So I do.

And oh my God. I like it.

Later on, the doorbell rings.

The gusts have died down outside, but the snow’s still falling. I’m on West’s couch, my laptop warming my thighs, my thoughts on Romantic poetry, Grecian vases, Mont Blanc. I’m gazing at the back of West’s head where he’s sitting on the floor by my hip, working out practice problems for his physics final. I’m trying to decide whether the sublime might actually be this moment. This glow in my body, my affection for his ears, the way my fingers want to rest on him when I’m thinking about the next paragraph I’m going to type.

The doorbell doesn’t make any sense at all. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to go outside in this weather or what possible reason a person who isn’t West or me could have to be here.

He’s standing up, though, almost immediately, sliding his phone out of his pocket, checking his texts or his email.

Oh, right, he’s a dealer.

“You expecting someone?”

The bakery was busy last night, a lot of students wanting to ensure they had enough supplies to stay high through a month’s worth of encounters with their parents or parties with their old friends from high school.

“No.”

He goes to the door, opens it, and blocks my view of the fire escape. He’s up on the second floor, the apartment above a store that sells gifts and women’s clothes. The landing outside is small, and the couch has a better angle on the door than my nook at the bakery. I can see two figures beyond West.

I’m not sure why I get up. Because I don’t want to feel apart from him today, I guess. Because I’m getting less willing to turn my eyes away from things that make me uncomfortable and simply pretend they’re not happening.

This is going to sound strange, but it’s a little bit because of West’s penis, too. By which I mean: I was afraid to touch him there without clear guidelines. Afraid I wouldn’t be any good at it, or I’d mess it up. But look how well it turned out when I did, right?

I’m afraid of this part of who he is, more afraid than I was of touching him. This West who breaks rules, who could get arrested or sent to jail—I don’t even know why he does it. Just for the money? Because he wants to? Because he wants to prove he’s not afraid?

Or maybe he does it because he likes it. He has an expertise that I don’t share—words I don’t know, mysteries of seeds and resin, weight and cost. He has that voice he uses when he’s dealing. I think it’s why I asked him to get me high when he came to my house. Because I want to know all the parts of him. Even the ones that scare me.

Anyway, I don’t sort through all this consciously. I just duck under his arm, smiling, touching him, staking a claim on this evening and this part of his life, on him, on everything.

And then I stop short, the smile falling off my face.

It’s Josh at the door, talking to West. And leaning against the rail behind him, wrapped in his winter coat, a hat, the scarf that I gave him last Christmas—it’s Nate.

He looks as shocked to see me here as I am to see him. His eyebrows draw together, his mouth going tight and white around the edges—pain—and then just as quickly it’s gone and he’s trying and failing to look indifferent.

The conversation dies.

“Hey, guys,” I say cheerfully. I’m not sure how else to play this. Someone has to smooth over this awkwardness, and I guess it’s got to be me. “Getting something to tide you over the break?”

“They’re not getting anything.” West’s tone is caustic. He looks at Josh. “What part of ‘Text me first’ and ‘Don’t come around where I live’ was so hard for you to understand?”

Josh’s chin comes up, defiant. “We just thought of it when we drove by. I figured you might be here, with finals going.”

West shakes his head. “I told you how it works.”

“Yeah, but—”

“I set the terms,” he says curtly. “Not you.”

“We’ll buy a whole ounce,” Nate says. He’s lounging against the railing, faking relaxation. His expression is all holier-than-thou, and I recognize it as the face he made when he wanted me to do something for him that I didn’t want to.

West has never looked at me like that.

“I had some of what you sold Marshall,” Nate says. “It’s good shit. He says it’s one fifty for the half ounce.”

“I’m not selling to you.”

“I’ll pay you four hundred.” There’s something smarmy in the way Nate says this—like he’s trying to figure out West’s price so he can pay it and then look down on him for being hard up enough to let himself be debased.

I’m kind of amazed. I mean, I saw him on the floor after West punched him. I can’t believe he has the guts to be here, much less to be acting so superior.

“Maybe I’m not being clear.” West is getting angry. “I wouldn’t sell to you no matter what you paid me.” He gestures at Josh. “I’m done with you, too. Get the fuck out of here.”

Nate’s jawline hardens. “You’re an asshole.”

“You’re a cocksucker.”

“Isn’t that more Caroline’s department?”

I have time to register what the words do to West—this weird ripple of tension through him as every part of his body goes hard and furious, all at once.

I have time to think, Oh, crap.

Then everything happens fast. West lunges forward and pushes me back into the apartment at the same time. I’m catching at his waist, trying to keep him from hitting anyone or getting hit, not on my account, not tonight. “Keep out of this,” he says, and he’s straight-arming me toward the door, but the fire escape is slippery and I lose my footing and bang my temple against something hard that makes me see stars, which I always thought was a figure of speech. Nate’s against the railing, West is on him, Josh is shoving West, West’s fist comes up—

I don’t think it’s West’s fault, I really don’t.

But when it’s all over, West is the one who’s standing on the fire escape in wet socks, absently rubbing his knuckles, and Nate is the one on his knees at the base of the stairs, cradling his ribs and spitting blood.

I think you need an ambulance.

I can walk.

Keep the fuck away from her.

She doesn’t belong to you.

Doesn’t belong to you, either, asshole.

Had your chance. Fucked it up.

Wish I’d had her longer. Miss that sweet ass. Or haven’t you fucked her there yet?

Get him out of here. I won’t be responsible.

Let’s go. Nate. Let’s go.

You’ll be sorry.

I slide down the doorjamb, shake my head, blinking. It’s cold.

I wish I hadn’t come to the door.

West is there, his face right in front of mine, his intensity almost more than I can take. “Shit, Caro, are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

He pulls me to my feet, puts his arm around me, shuts the door on Nate and Josh. They’re out there in the snow, Nate hobbling when he tries to walk, maybe hurt.

It’s so ugly. All of it, this ugliness, because of me.

I hate it.

I think I’m supposed to like it. I think of all the movies I’ve seen where the guy takes a swing for his woman. The girl never gets hit in those movies. Nobody ever runs to the bathroom, hunched over, and throws up half-digested chicken soup in the toilet.

Clearly, I’m doing this wrong. I’m doing everything wrong.

I hear West come into the room, but I don’t know what he wants from me. When I went to the door, before I even looked out on the fire escape, I put my arm around him and he shrank away from me.

It hurt when he did that. Everything that came after just made it hurt worse.

I think, inanely, of the present I gave him. The glittery bow. Two hundred dollars in an envelope.

What did he think I was paying him for?

The ugliness—it’s not just in me. It’s in him, too, and he doesn’t want me to know about it, but that doesn’t make it any less there.

I’m falling in love with a boy who sells drugs, who punches when he’s angry, who knows my body better than I do.

I’m already in love with him. With West, who likes to set the rules, and who doesn’t want me to hand him money in an envelope after I’ve taken his dick in my hand and made him come.

I don’t know who he is, what his past looks like. I can’t know, because he won’t tell me. But his present is ugly enough to make me starkly, painfully aware of my own naïveté.

I’m shaking, clutching cold porcelain, crying.

West crouches down beside me. “Let me look at your head.”

I let him. Even though I’m sick, sobbing more for him than for me. Even though I hate myself.

I curl up in West’s lap on his bathroom floor and let him look at my head, test me for a concussion, wrap his arms around me, and lean against the wall, holding me. Holding me.

Something is wrong with both of us, but I don’t ever want him to let go.