I think about pulling my foot back, but I’ll risk it. “I’ve got a mom. My dad’s … not around. Most of the time. Which is much better for everybody involved. He’s … bad news.”
She meets my eyes, a slight pucker between her eyebrows. Fully awake now—this is how she looks in class. Listening hard enough to hear everything I’m not saying in between the things I am. “What’s her name?”
“My mom? Michelle.”
“Is she married to your dad?”
“No.”
“So is she the Leavitt, or … ?”
“It’s my dad’s name.”
“Any more brothers and sisters?”
“Just Frankie. I told you about her.”
“No, you didn’t.”
Fair enough. “I will.”
She tilts her head, thinking. “What’s your favorite color?”
“Green.”
“Best place you’ve ever been on vacation.”
“We never went anywhere. California, I guess.”
“Best present you ever got.”
“That book you gave me.”
Her eyes widen a fraction. “It’s just a book. About bread.”
“I liked it.”
“What kind of presents do you usually get?”
“Clothes. Stuff I need. Shit my mom thought was funny but isn’t particularly. Bo gave me a fifth of whiskey at Christmas.”
“Who’s Bo?”
“My mom’s boyfriend. She and Frankie live with him.”
“Why did you dump me after break?”
I’m not expecting the question. My eyes flick to the darkness past her shoulder. “Do you think … if I promise to tell you anything you want, will you come back to my place?”
She doesn’t answer right away. Instead, she plucks the flowers out of my hand, peels back the clear plastic and tissue paper around the top, and studies them. “If this is just a cheap attempt to get laid on Valentine’s Day, it’s not going to work.”
“It’s not that.”
After a long moment, she looks up.
I’ve seen her face a hundred ways. Cautious and hopeful, brave and fierce, happy and crying. I’ve seen her soft and open, her mouth thoroughly kissed. I haven’t seen her look like this but once: that first night when I walked out to her car and invited her into the bakery.
Scared. She’s scared of what’s going to happen.
But she wants it anyway.
“What is this, then?” she asks.
I wish I could think of something perfect to say. I wish I had words that took in her and me, eighteen months of watching and waiting, nights I’ve lain awake, midnights we’ve passed together mixing dough and making each other laugh. Every dream I’ve had about her. Every time I heard her voice or got a text that made me smile or shake my head. Every night I held the phone to my ear and said whatever I could think of to make her squeak and moan and fall apart.
With all the ways I know her, I still don’t know how to make her understand how I can be standing here, completely unsure what it is I’m doing, where we’re headed, what this is—and how I can still be so positive this is where I belong.
She’s what I want. More than my plans, more than I want to be smart, more than I want to follow the rules—I want to be with her.
I need to. I have to. I want to.
I can’t waste any more time trying to figure out which of those it is. Not when I doubt we have all that much time left to waste.
“I want to be your boyfriend,” I blurt out.
Immediately I wish I’d thought of another way to put it. I want to be your boyfriend—worse than lame. Childish. The words drop into my gut, leaden.
I’ve never said them before.
Caroline is looking right at me, those big brown eyes full of interest and … sympathy, maybe.
Fuck it all, she feels sorry for me.
Too late. You waited too long.
But her mouth is soft, and so is her voice when she says, “Hang on a second.”
I wait in the doorway, a hook tied to a line held in Caroline’s hand. Just waiting to see where she’ll drag me.
Keys jingle. She comes back with her coat and the lanyard she uses as a key chain dangling from her fingers. Her boots are by the door. She shoves her feet into them, yanking them over her pajama pants. “Don’t wait up, Bridge,” she says, and moves through the door, closing it behind her, jiggling the handle to make sure it’s locked.
She’s coming with me.
She turns around, her face close to mine, her body close, the flowers pressing into my coat, rustling and crinkling.
“Am I driving?”
I just stare at her. I haven’t got a clue what I said to get this lucky.
Maybe she’s a gift. The universe paying me back for my dad being such a hopeless shithead.
I’ll take it.
“West?”
“Is … is that a yes?”
Her shoulders lift and fall with another plastic crinkle. “Do I ever tell you no?”
“You did once.”
She smiles—her smile like the pink and orange at the horizon when I walk out of the bakery into the alley and get surprised by the morning.
I’ve been in the dark. I’ve been solitary, single-minded in pursuit of a life that felt like it might be enough—until she walked into it and it wasn’t.
Deeper or nothing. My new motto.
“I didn’t tell you no,” she says. “I told you to make up your fucking mind. And look!” She waves the flowers in my face. “It worked. Now I’m being wooed.”
“That’s what you wanted, huh?” I smile. “Some good old-fashioned wooing?”
“Maybe it’s some of what I wanted.”
I lean in, on solid ground at last. “I’ll woo you until you can’t walk, sweetheart.”
“Promises, promises.”
She closes her eyes when I kiss her, but I keep mine open.
I want to watch the sun rise.
I think it’s supposed to be awkward—walking to her car, the night cold enough to freeze my balls off. Driving to my apartment with the heat blasting and quiet all around us.
We go up the fire escape, leave our shoes by the door, pass through the common area into my bedroom. I hang my coat over my desk chair and sit down on the bed, legs stretched out, back against the wall.
She considers for a moment, then does the same thing.
We’re side by side on my bed, and I keep waiting for it to go wrong, to feel wrong, but all I can feel is relief, if relief feels like walking with nothing dragging behind you after you’ve been towing a trailer of misery around for most of your life.
I turn a little so I can look at her.
Her hair’s still all screwed up. She’s got crud at the inside corner of one eye, and her bottom lip has a raised elliptical pad on it like you get when your lips are too dry because of the weather or because you’ve been biting them.
Which she does, while I watch. She catches her lip between her teeth, sucks it into her mouth, releases it with grooved white lines that pink up as I watch.
I want to devour her.
I’m pretty sure it’s not time yet.
“You have to tell me what you need me to do now,” I say. “I mean, you want to talk, but I’m not sure … I’m complete shit at this.”
It’s another kind of relief, it turns out. To be shit at it, and to just be able to say so.
“This being, what? Girls?” She’s smiling.
“Yeah, you’d love for me to admit that.”
“It would make me pretty happy to hear you say you’re shit with girls, yeah.”
“You didn’t used to have any complaints about my skills.”
“But that was, like, a practice environment. Make-out homework.”
“You’re saying I might be the kind of person who can’t hack it in a real-world application.”
She turns toward me, resting her shoulder against the wall. “I’m saying I have a feeling you’ve never had a girlfriend before.”
“That’s true,” I tell her. “I’ve been with girls but I’ve never—”
I think about how to put it, and I start to tie myself up in knots before I remember that it’s just Caroline and me. I get more than one shot at putting it right if it comes out wrong the first time.
“You’re the first girl I ever cared about this way.”
I thought admitting that to Caroline would be like taking a piece of myself and handing it to her.
It is.
And it isn’t.
It’s more like … like there’s all this stuff I’ve packed into myself, a defense against what I’m afraid of. Rocks and dirt, bits of rebar and junk that I’ve found by the roadside. And what I’m giving her isn’t me, it’s a clawed-off piece of this barrier that I’ve gotten used to thinking of as me.
I don’t need it. Not to keep me safe from her.
She’s smiling, looking down at her hands where they’re laid out on the bed. Just an inch or so from my hands. She nudges her fingers over until they overlap the tips of mine. “You know what the magic word was, at my room?”
“No, what?”
“Boyfriend.” She glances at my face, then back down. “That’s why I came with you. Because you said that.”
“I should’ve said it a long time ago.”
I mean it, too. I wish I’d been able to. I wish I hadn’t wasted every night I might have been able to spend with her. “Friend. Boyfriend. You deserved both.”
She reaches up to touch my face. Her fingers stroke over my forehead, past my temple, over my cheekbone, curling into a loose fist so she can skate her knuckles over my mouth. “You’ll really tell me anything?”
“Yeah.” The word is a whisper, the movement of my lips against her skin.
“If I asked you why you got so upset when I gave you that money at Christmas …”
God damn. Way to pick a woman who goes for the throat.
“Yes. If you asked me.”
She sits, watching me for a moment.
“If I asked you why you came out to my car that night at the bakery?”
I nod and turn her hand over. Kiss her palm. It’s corny, I guess, but I’m just so fucking happy she’s here.
“How many … partners you’ve had.”
I kiss her wrist. “Yes.”
“How you feel about me.”
“Yes.”
But I think maybe she knows that already. I think it’s there when I look at her, when she looks at me. If it wasn’t already there, we wouldn’t have lasted so long. We wouldn’t have put each other through so much when it would’ve been easier to just not.
I like her, and I love her, and I want her.
If she asks, I’ll tell her.
For now, though, because I want to and she’s staring at my lips, I kiss her neck. I find her pulse and pause there, lick it, imagining the rush of blood and heat at her throat. Flattering myself that her heart’s beating faster because of me.
I keep thinking she’s going to stop me, but she doesn’t, so I kiss all along beneath her jaw, behind her ear. I kiss her eyelids and her nose, her cheekbones, her chin.
I get my hand at the base of her spine, press up so she’ll lift her hips, ease her down onto the bed.
I kiss her mouth.
She tastes like everything I’ve been starving for.
I keep on kissing her, and she keeps letting me. Her arms sneak around my back and rake down my spine. I’m over her, hips centered above hers, hard against soft. I didn’t plan this, but her lips shape the welcome I’ve been waiting for my whole life, her arms are the anchor I need, her body is my home.
We’re right together, Caroline and me. Even if I’m doing this wrong, completely fucking wrong, it doesn’t matter.