Deeper

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.