“I’m not letting go.”
Hands on his hips, he glares at Nate, who’s smirking now. He really does deserve to get punched in the nose.
But that’s neither here nor there. I made my feelings about violence clear when I puked in West’s toilet. I don’t like it. I don’t want it. I didn’t ask for it.
“Get off me,” West says. “This is between me and him.”
“No, it’s not.”
“He called the cops on me.”
“And that was one move in a longer war, and the war is about me, and I say no. No fighting. I hate it. It doesn’t fix anything. It just gives you an excuse to let off steam, which isn’t fair, anyway. I mean, I’ve got steam, too, and I don’t get to punch people.” I look up at West, arms around his ankles, pleading with him. “I get that you’re frustrated, okay? I get it. You’re mad. You want to fix this for me. But you can’t fix this for me. All you can do is make it worse.”
I can see the moment when it sinks in. Maybe not what I’m saying so much as the fact that I’m practically laid out on the floor, tangled up in his legs. He’s not going to accomplish anything this way.
Nate sees it, too. He walks in to Student Affairs without another glance.
The breath explodes out of West in a loud, frustrated sigh.
After a few seconds, when I’ve started to feel silly—I mean, how is it, exactly, that I ended up wrapped around the legs of a shirtless man in such a short span of time?—he gives me his hand. “Come here.”
His palm is hot and damp, his grip strong. When I’m on my feet, he frames my face between his hands. “You’re mine. He hurt you. I want to hurt him.”
“I know.”
“It’s the only thing I can do for you.”
“It’s not, though. It’s not what I need from you. You have to trust that I can do this. It’s my fight.”
“Feels like my fight, too.”
I turn my face into his palm. Kiss him there, where I can feel his pulse in his hand. “That’s because we’re a team.” I smile against his skin. “But I’m the leader.”
He snorts. “You’re not the leader.”
“I am, too. You should’ve seen me in that meeting. I kicked ass.”
“I bet you did.”
“West?” I look up at him. There’s more ease in his expression now, softness in his eyes that I put there. “I need you to believe in me. Even if there are times nobody else does, I need you to be the one person in my life who trusts that I can kick all the ass that needs to be kicked.”
“Of course you can. But it’s not—”
“And then,” I interrupt, because this is important. “And then, even though I know it’s harder and it’s not what you want, I need you to let me do it.”
He gazes past me at the doorway where Nate isn’t anymore.
“West, look at me.”
He does.
“There’s going to be some other chance like this. Sometime when I’m not around and you get a shot at Nate. I’m asking you to promise me you’re not going to take it.”
“Caro.”
“Please.” I touch his cheekbone. Pet his neck. He feels so dangerous, right on the edge, and I need to pull him back, because I know that this decision—right now—is one of those pivot points. A make-or-break moment.
I can’t be with him if he won’t let me fight my own battles.
He covers my hand with his and holds it against the bend between neck and shoulder.
I love his eyes. I love the way he looks at me, what he sees in me, who we are together.
“I hate not being able to do anything for you,” he says.
“You’re doing everything for me. Just by being you.” I kiss him. “Promise me.”
His breath against my mouth is a sigh and a capitulation. “I promise.”
“Thank you.” I stroke his neck and kiss him again. He’s so warm, wired, animal.
Also, shirtless.
When his tongue parts my lips, I go weak against him. The kiss gets serious, fast. My back bumps into the wall, his hand catches behind my knee.
“Let’s go home,” I say.
We don’t even make it to the parking lot before he’s pushing me up against a tree, the bark rough at the back of my head until his hand is there, protecting me.
Then, scorching heat and roving hands. I’m wet, was already wet in the hall, wetter still as I pushed through the door and he gave it a shove from behind me, groped my ass with his free hand in the deepest, dirtiest way.
“Home,” I say on a gasp.
“Yeah.”
“You drive.”
“Keys.”
I fish them out of my purse, although I’m not sure how. West is no help. His hands are all over me. “Here.”
I have to dangle them in front of his face to get his attention.
Back at the apartment, Krishna and Bridget are waiting.
“How’d it go?”
“Did you nail his ass?”
West doesn’t even let me talk. He pushes me in front of him, says, “Give us a minute,” and slams the door to his bedroom in their surprised faces.
“That was rude.”
He’s too busy unbuttoning my pants to answer.
A few quick jerks, a shove onto the bed, a condom retrieved from the desk, and he’s on me, pushing my knees open, testing me with his fingers. When he feels how wet I am, he makes that mmm sound that drives me crazy. “Hurry,” I tell him.
It doesn’t last long, but oh, God, it’s amazing. One confident thrust and he’s filling me, our tongues dancing, his belt buckle jingling as he moves into me hard and deep. We don’t talk. I’m not sure we breathe. He needs to claim me, and I need to claim him, too, his flaws and his anger and his stupid macho protective bullshit, his promise and his body and the way he is, frustrating and imperfect, gorgeous and hot, violent and intelligent and real.
He sucks my nipple into his mouth, laps it with his tongue the way he knows drives me crazy, gets his hand up under me and tilts to put friction where I need it. It doesn’t take much. I’m close. So close already, and he feels bigger and harder and deeper than ever, driving fast, breathing ragged against my neck. “Come on, baby,” he says, and I make this sound like a sob, but I’ve never felt this good.
Tighter and harder, I dig into his shoulders when I start to come, needing to hold on to him, to keep him here, right here, this close. He groans, pushes his forehead into mine, kisses my temple when I turn my head, comes inside me holding my hands, our fingers interlaced, his grip so tight that the ache in my joints is the first thing I feel when I’m capable of feeling anything but bliss.
I wiggle my fingers, and he lets go.
“Holy crap.”
He grins.
“That was—holy crap.”
He kisses my nose, still smiling, and shakes his head.
“Seriously. That’s all I’ve got. I’m sure there are other words, but …”
West starts laughing, his belly moving against mine. “Never let it be said the caveman thing doesn’t turn you on.”
“It doesn’t!”
He keeps laughing, so I pinch him. “Last time you hit Nate, I puked!”
“You just came in, like, fifteen seconds. And that time at the library—”
“Don’t even bring that up.”
“After I decked him. You were hot for me.”
“I was not!”
“You would’ve let me do anything to you that day.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“You so would have. I should’ve kissed you. Skipped all those months we spent kidding ourselves. Don’t tell me you weren’t thinking about it.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Right, because you’re such a good girl.”
I get my hands around his head, pull him close, kiss him. “Okay, maybe I was thinking about it. But only because you so clearly needed an outlet for all that rampant testosterone.”
“You would’ve volunteered to be my outlet?”
“Your receptacle. Because I’m a giver.”
“I just gave you an orgasm that made your eyes cross.”
“Well, sure. Giving has its benefits.”
He starts laughing again, and I hug him tight, loving the way his body feels against mine.
Loving him.
When we come out, we bump through the bedroom doorway, West’s hand at my hip, a shit-eating grin on his face that I can’t see but can feel with my whole body.
Happy.
It’s amazing, I think, that we can find so much happiness at a time like this. I mean, yes, sex. But it’s not really the sex. It’s what’s underneath the sex. It’s how he makes me feel, how I make him feel, how we are together. This golden ribbon of something beautiful we’ve always had between us, there even when I was peering into his car and trying not to look too hard at the bare slice of flat stomach reflected in the car window. Even when we were arguing at the library, not-touching at the bakery, kissing on the train tracks.
Even when I told him to make up his mind and walked out on him, that ribbon was there—a shining possibility underneath.
I do feel a little awkward, though, about Krishna and Bridget. Who are sitting on the couch, watching TV kind of … tensely.
I think the tension must be in their bodies. Bridget sits ramrod straight, the back of her neck pink. Krishna’s got his arm braced along the top of the cushions, his whole body turned toward her, one knee up on the couch, even, and I get this impression of haste, like maybe he just moved away from her, even though I would have seen it if he had.
If he’d been two feet closer to Bridget, his arm right behind her, leaning over her, leaning into her, and then hastily moved away to where he is now when I pulled open the bedroom door—I never could have missed it.
Except I think maybe I did, because when Krishna turns around, this kind of hard, glistening something in his eyes reminds me of a horse about to buck.
I’ve never even seen a horse about to buck, but that’s what I think of. A terrible impulse, barely contained.
“What are you watching?” West asks.
It’s a fair question. Because they’re watching My Little Pony. With the volume weirdly low. Like, barely audible low.
Bridget is picking at her track bottoms, pinching little tents at the spot where her knee bends and the material wrinkles up.
Krishna is looking everywhere, at nothing.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen the two of them in the same room together but not talking. They are both Olympic-medal talkers. Talking is practically their religion.
I’ve definitely never seen them look so awkward.
Nor have I known Bridget to fail to answer a direct question.
That’s the point at which I would like to crawl into a cave for a while so I can sit with my humiliation, because of course this is our fault, West and me with our door-slamming and our probably loud loud loud sex noises through the thin walls, and Bridget and Krishna out here listening for God knows how long.
How awful are we?
Totally awful. I’m not a good friend. They’re here to support me after my meeting with the administration, and I let them be sexiled to the living room to marinate in the discomfort of West’s and my grunting horrible coitus sounds.
If that’s even what they were doing. Marinating in discomfort.
I don’t know. I’m just thinking about the best way to sweep the whole thing under the rug—apologize? But how can you apologize for sex noises? I would die—when West takes the conversation in completely the other direction.
“Is this one of those things where you mute the TV and replace it with another soundtrack? Like watching The Wizard of Oz while listening to Dark Side of the Moon, except with My Little Pony and Caroline and me fucking?”