“Tell me what you were going to say,” he demands. I tip sideways on the couch, coughing so hard that I have to pull my knees up. West rubs my back.
“Breathe,” he says in a low murmur.
Even that’s sexy. I’m choking to death, racked with guilt over what Bridget almost revealed, and I still have a corner of my brain devoted to fainting at the hotness of West. I’m a hopeless case.
Bridget crosses her arms, squared off against Krishna. “I’m not telling.”
“Tell me.”
“No.”
“Tell me tell me tell me tell me tell me tell me tell me tell me—”
“Oh, all right. I was just going to say about this guy she met.”
“There’s a guy?” Quinn asks.
I’m barely capable of inhaling. When I say, “There’s no guy,” I drool a little on the leather, and I have to wipe it off with the palm of my hand.
I can’t look at West.
“It’s too late to deny it,” Krishna says. “Bridget already spilled. Who’s the guy?”
I don’t see any way out of telling them. I sit up. “You remember Scott?” I ask Quinn.
“Rugby Scott?”
“Yeah.”
“He asked you out?”
“No! No. It’s nothing. It’s just … I just mentioned to Bridget that I might try to find out his last name. From you. In case.”
“So you can call him?”
“Maybe?”
“He was into you,” she says. “You should definitely call him.”
“You think?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Who’s rugby Scott?” Krishna asks.
“He goes to Carson,” Quinn says. “You wouldn’t know him. And he’s really nice. And hot. Well done, Caroline.”
“I haven’t done anything yet.”
She chucks me on the shoulder. “Sure, but you should. Get back out there, you know?”
I duck my head. Sidelong, I glance at West.
He’s gone blank.
Krishna is looking at him, too, and I can’t make out whether he pushed West into that blank face on purpose or if he’s oblivious. That’s the thing with Krishna—I can never figure out if he’s an asshole or if he’s pretending to be an asshole.
Either way.
He drops to the couch beside Bridget, chugs the rest of his beer, and says, “Maybe we should find something else to watch.”
West opens his bedroom door. “I’ve got to study.”
He closes it, and then there’s just the sound of the TV and Bridget shifting uncomfortably on her end of the couch.
“I didn’t do anything,” I say. “I don’t even know his last name.”
But I’m not sure who I’m talking to.
No one replies.
“So when are you heading home?” West asks.
“Tomorrow.”
It’s the Tuesday before Thanksgiving—or Wednesday, I guess, since it’s three in the morning. Campus has been a ghost town since lunchtime, and West has been at the bakery all day. He had to come in early. He’ll stay late. He has an insane amount of baking to do to help Bob get the holiday orders filled.
It doesn’t matter, he told me. He’s got the whole rest of break to sleep.
“Early?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“Can you go vent the oven for me?”
I walk over to the oven—which is more like a metal closet with glass in the door—and push the button to vent the steam so the loaves will start to dry out during the last few minutes of baking.
“Thanks.”
I hop up on the counter and study the room. Since October, it’s become almost as familiar to me as my dorm room, and I’ve stopped noticing how crowded it is. How the vented steam smells of moist dough, raw and wet. How West’s hands are always busy, the floor is always dirty, and I’m always safe, even if I’m not always comfortable.
Officially we’re on break, and I should be at home.
Home has become an increasingly difficult concept. I still talk to my dad once a week, but I’ve come to dread our conversations. I’ve been a daddy’s girl my whole life, and now I don’t know what to say to him. He asks me how Con Law is going, if the class is as tough as I feared. He reminds me that I should look into summer internships at the career center, because I ought to have some experience before I start applying to law schools in a few years.
He tells me he loves me and reminds me to be safe.
I hang up the phone with a piercing pain in my stomach. I feel like a liar, but I haven’t told him a single lie.
For the first time since I got to Putnam, I don’t want to go home for break. Dad gets into the whole turkey thing, and I’m in charge of stuffing. My sister Janelle and her fiancé do cranberry sauce and rolls. Alison, my other sister, is in Lesotho with the Peace Corps, but if she were home she would do pumpkin pie.
I guess I should take over pie duty.
I’m supposed to get fitted for a bridesmaid’s dress for Janelle’s wedding, which is coming up in the summer. She emails me details about the venues they’re looking at, the colors she likes, the save-the-date cards they’re having made on Etsy. I know I’m supposed to be excited, so I act that way, but I can’t drum up any enthusiasm.
“You ever call that guy?” West asks.
It’s been two days since he shut himself up in his room. This is the first time either of us has mentioned that conversation.
“Scott,” I say.
“I didn’t forget.”
“No. I didn’t call him yet.”
His phone buzzes. West checks it and taps out a message to someone. He’s been glued to it all night, distracted. He hasn’t told me who he’s talking to. It could be his sister, his mother, some girlfriend back home he’s never mentioned.
He doesn’t tell me anything.
Tonight he has nothing to teach me. All these weeks of glazing and proofing, I feel as though we’ve never talked about what it is I’m actually supposed to be learning.
I never asked him to be my teacher. It’s not what I want from him.
But on the other hand, I’ve found proof of West’s lessons scattered all over my life. Proof that what Nate did to me isn’t the only thing about me worth talking about. Proof that just as I could have walked in to the bakery any night, I can also walk in to a party or out onto a rugby field.
I’m still here. I’m basically okay. I don’t require coddling, and I’m not going to buy into any more bullshit.
I am overproofed, utterly sick of pretense. Because the other thing I’ve figured out since October is that West tells me nothing, and if there is nothing I can teach him, we’ll never be more than we are in this room.
He’s staying here over the break. It costs too much and takes too long to fly to Oregon for the paltry few days off we get, and, anyway, Bob needs his help.
West told me all that.
What he didn’t tell me is that he wants to go home—but I know he does, even though I’m not sure where home is, what town he’s from, what’s there for him. I don’t know because he doesn’t say. He doesn’t tell me why his attention is so riveted on his phone, why he’s distracted all the time lately, what he’s worrying about.
I know he’s worrying. I know something about him isn’t right. But I also know he’s never going to look up from the bread and say to me, Caro, can I tell you something?
An awkward sort of finality has settled between us tonight, and I think it must be because of that conversation at the apartment.
Maybe I’m wrong, though. Maybe it happened when he handed me the envelope full of money. The money changed something.
If West shared his own weed with friends, he’d be a guy who was fun to party with. Since he sells it to them, he’s a felon. That’s because of the money.
I’m supposed to be rich. He’s supposed to be poor. He gave me fifteen hundred dollars, and now something is different between us, but he won’t tell me what, and I won’t ask.
I’m not brave enough to push him, but I wish he would tell me. I wish he would need me. Because I’m not sure how much longer I can stand to be the only one in this kitchen who will admit to being vulnerable. And I’m not sure, either, how much longer I’m going to need this—these late-night drives to the bakery, these hours with West working and the mixers going.
There is so much more we could be saying to each other, and aren’t.
Tonight the mixer’s rattling song sounds like a dirge, and I feel nothing but grief. I woke up from a nightmare to come here—a dream where I was out on the rugby field in a nightgown, wading through a thick fog, and I couldn’t find something I needed, couldn’t hear anyone calling for me. I felt irrevocably lost.
This night—this moment—this is the end of something, and we’ve failed at it.
“I’m going to miss you,” I tell him.
He’s got his back to me. Without responding or even acknowledging that I spoke, he turns up the mixer to high. It bangs around so loudly, I can’t hear the music. I cover my ears and listen to the beating of my heart with my eyes closed. When I open them, it’s because his hand is on my thigh, and he’s standing right in front of me, filling my whole field of vision.
His eyes are silvery-blue, cast into shadow by his indrawn eyebrows, startling and intense.
Krishna and Quinn are right—West is always touching me.
I always feel it.
His hand on my thigh makes me throb. Between my legs. My heart. My throat.
Everywhere.
Stupid girl.
When he moves his hand, I clutch at it. I overlap our fingers, mine on top of his, and press down, hard.
West looks at our hands, and he sighs. “What am I supposed to do about you? I think you’d better tell me, Caro, because I don’t have a fucking clue.”
I gaze at the knob of his wristbone. At the dark hair on his forearms, the divot of his throat, the patch beneath his lip where he missed a few hairs when he shaved.
His mouth. His eyes. His mouth.
Always his mouth, wide and smart-alecky, generous and withholding.
I wait for West’s mouth to make words I’m never going to hear.
I’ll miss you.
I care about you.
I don’t want you going out with that guy, because I want you with me. I want us to be more than this.
I want to say, Tell me everything, West. Please.
But in the morning I’m going to drive home and see my father. Whatever it is West might have to say, tonight isn’t the right night for him to say it, and I’m not the right person for him to say it to.
It’s not just him. It’s me. I’m not brave enough.
My fingertips skate over the shapes of his face. The arch of his eyebrow and the scar that bisects it. The curve of his ear. The lush fullness of his mouth.
I want to breathe in when he exhales, rest against his body, wrap my legs around his waist, and take him inside me.
I don’t know how to get rid of this.
I don’t know how to give him up.
The oven timer beeps. West steps away from me and turns it off. Opens the door. Takes out the bread.
The whole rest of the night, he keeps his distance.
In the morning, I get in my car and put sixty miles between us, but it’s not far enough.
I don’t know how far I’d have to go for it to be far enough.
THANKSGIVING BREAK
West
Don’t get involved, I told myself in the beginning. She’s not your problem.
But I was already involved, even then. By Thanksgiving, I was so involved with Caroline, I almost couldn’t stand to see her.
Everything I told her was a lie.
We weren’t going to be friends, I’d promised. But what else do you call it when you text somebody a million times a day and look forward to seeing them even though you just fucking saw them?