Deeper

I might never have learned how to stop being afraid, and those men would have kept chasing me around, always.

I can’t be anything but glad that’s not the way things went.

Instead, West came out, and I went in.

After that, I rarely wanted to be anywhere else.

“You’re buzzing again.”

I’m in my nook, a little area on the bakery floor between the sink and the long table against the wall where West lines up his mixing bowls. I like it here because I can only usually see a slice of him at a time.

I watch his boots, his pant legs from the knees down, his apron.

During this part of the night, when he’s mixing, he’s always moving. Rocking from one foot to the other if he’s feeding and stirring the sourdough starter. Pacing from the sink to the mixer to the refrigerator to the storage room, back to the mixer, back to the sink, over to the counter to pick up a tool he’s forgotten.

The way he moves is almost more than I can take. His lazy grace. His competence.

His arms come into view as he lifts one bowl off the stand and puts the next one on. He bends over, and I see his hat and his neck, his face in profile, his jeans tight over his bent leg, the shape of his calf.

I can handle him in pieces. They’re all nice pieces, but they don’t make me break out in a nervous sweat, like I did last night when it was time to head home and he walked me to the back door, propped his hand up on the jamb, and said something that made him smile down at me and lean in. I don’t know what it was. I couldn’t hear him, because the way he had his arm braced made his shirt sleeve ride up to reveal his whole biceps, a defined curve of taut muscle engaged against the doorframe. I fell into a biceps wormhole, and then I made the grave error of looking at his mouth, the shape of his lips and his cheekbones, his chin and his eyes. I forgot to listen to him.

I forgot to breathe or exist outside of West’s face.

Yeah. That’s a thing that can happen, apparently, and when it happens, it’s really bad. He had to snap his fingers in front of my nose to wake me up. It made me startle, and I stepped backward and nearly fell down. West just smiled kind of indulgently.

“Text me when you get home,” he said, and I said something that sounded like gnugh.

I guess he’s used to me being hopeless around him. We both just pretend I’m not. It sort of works.

West and I are like that. We sort of work.

I’ve been coming to the bakery two or three nights a week—almost every shift he’s on, I’m here. Insomnia has made me her bitch, but it doesn’t matter so much when I can hang out with West and study in my little nook. I nap after class. I’m turning into a creature of the night. It’s all right, though. I guess I’d rather be Bella Swan hanging out at the Cullen place than, you know, school Bella—all pissy and defensive, clomping around Forks High, convinced everyone hates her.

The men in my head are quiet when I’m at the bakery. I think if they called me names, West would glower at them and tell them to shut the fuck up. If they were real, I mean. Which they’re not.

West’s phone is still buzzing, vibrating itself partway off the edge of the tabletop. I poke out a finger and push it back to safety. “Dough boy,” I say, loud, because it’s hard to hear with the mixer going. “Your phone.”

“What?”

“Your phone.”

I point, and he finally understands. He walks over and picks it up off the metal countertop right beside me.

I made the mistake of grabbing it once, thinking I would hand it to him. The look on his face—he has this way of shutting down his whole expression so it looks like there’s no feeling in him at all.

He’s hilariously funny when he wants to be, wickedly smart, open and teasing—and then suddenly I step over some invisible line and he’s a robot. Or too intense, complaining about how something is bullshit, like he did that first night I came here.

He takes his phone into the front of the store, where I won’t be able to hear him talking.

I go back to my Latin, though it’s hard to concentrate, knowing, as I do, that in ten or fifteen minutes someone will show up at the alley door. West will meet him there, positioning his body so I can’t see who he’s talking to, mumbling in this low voice that makes him sound like just another dude, a slacker. His shoulders will slouch. His hands will dip in and out of his pockets, propelled along by his soothing, nonthreatening voice.

I try not to see. It’s better if I stick to the slices. That’s the only way we can be friends—or not-friends, I guess.

And I need to be not-friends with West. He’s the only person in my whole life who doesn’t treat me like nothing happened but who also doesn’t treat me like everything happened. He says, “How’s it going?” when I walk in the door, and I tell him the truth, but afterward that’s that. We’re done talking about it.

Tucked in my nook at the bakery, for a few hours two or three nights a week, I feel like myself.

When he comes back, he hops up on the nearest table opposite me and says, “What’s that, Latin?”

“Yeah. I’ve got a quiz tomorrow.”

“Need help with your verbs?”

“No, I’m good.”

“Are you staying long enough for me to teach you all the finer points of muffin glazing?”

“Probably not. I’ve got to write a response paper for Con Law, and I didn’t bring my laptop.”

“You should’ve. I like it when you write here.”

I do, too. He’s quiet when I need him to be quiet, and when I want a break he’ll teach me some bread thing. If I read him my draft out loud, he’ll suggest some change that sounds small but always ends up making the paper more concise, the argument stronger.

West is smart. Crazy smart. I had no idea—the one time I had a class with him, he didn’t talk.

It is possible he’s actually smarter than I am.

“Next week, then,” he says. “Tuesday you will learn the secrets of the glaze.”

I smile. I think he likes teaching me stuff nearly as much as he liked learning it in the first place. He’s almost insatiably curious. No matter what homework I’m doing, he’ll end up asking me fifty questions about it.

“Sounds good. Are you on at the restaurant this weekend?”

“Yeah. What about you, you got plans?”

I want to hang out with you. Come over Sunday, and we’ll watch bad TV.

Let’s go to the bar.

Let’s go out to dinner in Iowa City.

Sometimes I invent a life in which my being more than not-friends with West is a possibility. A life where we get to hang out somewhere other than a kitchen at midnight.

Then I mentally pinch myself, because, no, I want less scandal, not more.

“Bridget is trying to get me to go to that party tomorrow night.”

“Where’s that?”

“A bunch of the soccer players.”

“Oh, at Bourbon House?”

“Yeah, are you going?”

“I’ll be at work.”

“After you get off?”

He smiles. “Nah. You should go, though.”

When Bridget suggested it, the idea filled me with panic. A crush of bodies, all those faces I would have to study for signs of judgment, pity, disgust. I can’t have fun when I’m so busy monitoring my behavior, choosing the right clothes, plastering a just-so smile on my face and watching, watching, while the men in my head tell me I look like a whore and I should pick somebody already. Take him upstairs and let him suck my tits, because that’s all a slut like me is good for.

Bridget thinks I need to get out more, pick my life back up where I left it. Otherwise, Nate wins.

I see her point. But I can’t make myself want to.

I look at the corrugated soles of West’s boots, swinging a few feet from my face. At the way his knuckles look, folded around the edge of the table. The seam at his elbows.

If West were going to the party, I would want to.

“I might.”

“Do you some good,” he says. “Get shit-faced, dance a little. Maybe you’d even meet somebody worth keeping you busy nights so you’re not hanging around here harassing me all the time.”

He grins when he says it. Just kidding, Caro, that grin says. We both know you’re too fucked in the head to be hooking up with anybody.

Before I’ve even caught my breath, he’s hopped down and moved toward the sink, where he fills a bucket with soapy water so he can wipe down his countertops.

I look at my Latin book, which really is verbs, and I blink away the sting in my eyes.

Video, videre, vidi, visus. To see.

Cognosco, cognoscere, cognovi, cognotus. To understand.

Maneo, manere, mansi, mansurus. To remain.

I see what he’s doing. Every now and then, West throws some half-teasing comment out to remind me I’m not his girlfriend. He smiles as he tells me something that means, You’re not important to me. We’re not friends.

He pulls me closer with one hand and smashes an imaginary fist into my face with the other.

I know why he does it. He doesn’t want me to get close.

I don’t know why.

But I see. I understand.

I remain.

We’re a mess, West and me.

He cleans the tables off, his movements abrupt and jerky. Agitated. When he switches to dishes, he’s slamming the pans around instead of stacking them. He’s so caught up with the noise he’s making that when a figure appears at the back door, West doesn’t notice.

I do, though. I look up and see Josh there. He used to be my friend, before. Now I see him around with Nate. I think he’s going out with Sierra. He’s standing with his wallet in his hand, looking awkward.

“Hey, Caroline,” he says.

“Hey.”

West turns toward me, follows my eyes to the doorway. He frowns deeply and stalks toward the door. Josh lifts the wallet, and West kind of shoves it down and aside as he moves out into the alley, forcing Josh to step back. “Put your fucking money away,” I hear him say as the door swings closed. “Jesus Christ.”

Then the kitchen is empty—just me and the white noise of the mixer, the water running in the sink.

When he comes back in, he’s alone, his hand pushing something down deep in his pocket. “You didn’t see that,” he says.

Which is dumb.

I guess he thinks he’s protecting me. If I can’t see him dealing, I’m not an accessory. I’m the oblivious girl in the corner, unable to put two and two together and get four.

“Yes, I did.”

He levels this look at me. Don’t push it.

I haven’t seen that look since the library. It makes me dump my book on the floor and stand up, and when I’m standing I can feel it more—how my chest is still aching from the hurt of what he said a few minutes ago. How my heart pounds, because he hurt me on purpose, and I’m angry about it.

I’m angry.

He turns his back on me and starts to wash a bowl.

“What kind of profit do you make, anyway?” I ask. “On a sale like that, is it even worth it? Because I looked it up—it’s a felony to sell. You’d do jail time if you got arrested. There’s a mandatory minimum five-year sentence.”

He keeps cleaning the bowl, but his shoulders are tight. The tension in the room is thick as smoke, and I don’t know why I’m baiting him when I’m close to choking on it.

He’s right to try to protect me. My dad would have kittens if he found out I was here, with West dealing out the back door, selling weed with the muffins. He would ask me if I’d lost my mind, and what would I say to him? It’s only weed? I don’t think West even smokes it?

Excuses. My dad hates excuses.

The truth is that I don’t make any excuses for it. I turn myself into an accessory every time I come here and sit on the floor by West, and I don’t care. I really don’t. I used to. Last year I was scandalized by the pot.