He squats down and crosses his arms over my thighs and leans way in. Our noses are a millimeter apart. I want to turn my head away, except I don’t. His mouth moves so close to mine that it feels like kissing when he says, “That’s what I want, Caroline. That’s what I never told you. I see your face when I close my eyes. Over break, when you called? I jerked off to the sound of your voice while you were on the phone. I’m selfish and no good for you, I’ve got nothing to give you and no room for you in my life, and I want you anyway.”
I’m still. So still, because I need to let his words sink in.
Not so I can figure them out. It’s going to take me a long time to figure them out, and right now I don’t care. I just need to feel what he said all the way through me, because his greed—his need—is all around me, touching my skin, and my heart wants to gather it in.
Deep and then deeper, just like he said.
So I do that while he waits. I pack his words around my heart, knowing I shouldn’t, because they’re not the right words. It’s dangerous to want West so much that I’ll take any crumb he gives me—any profane, broken piece of him—and turn it into a love letter.
It’s desperate and damaged, stupid and wrong.
I don’t care. I don’t care.
“West?” I whisper.
“Yeah.”
Our lips are touching, dry brushes of his mouth over mine when he speaks and then after—I guess after, which means this is a kiss, even though I haven’t admitted I’m open to more kissing.
“You’re a horrible friend.”
“We’re not friends.”
His hands. His hands on my face again, cupping my jaw, framing my ear, fingers slipping into my hair.
“You would be the worst boyfriend in the entire history of boyfriends.”
He drops, knees on the floor now, one arm at my hips pulling me closer so I’m practically falling off the edge of the bed, except he’s there to catch me. His mouth is open. His tongue is hot. Licking me. Asking me to let him in. “Not gonna be your boyfriend.”
“Then what. What.”
It’s not a question. I’m not capable of concentrating enough to ask him a question, because I’m falling into him, finding a way around his elbows and his roving hands to get him closer, tighter. My lips yield to his tongue. I’m pulsing and hot, slick and floating, lost and stupid, and it’s better than anything.
He gets a knee between my legs, drags me up his thigh with both hands on my butt. He kisses me hard, hard enough that it hurts, but I don’t care, because all I want is him closer. I don’t care until he pulls my head back and nips at my neck and I look up at the ceiling, where the light is so bright it hurts my eyes. I close them, dizzy, and the brightness flashes like a strobe.
Like a camera.
This is nuts.
This is reckless.
“West,” I say.
“Caroline,” he mutters.
“Stop.”
He stops.
When he lifts his head, his eyes are sex-drugged and sleepy. His lips are red, his skin flushed behind the stubble on his chin, and I feel the tingling raw spot on my neck where he scraped against me. I want him to do that everywhere on my body—leave marks behind, make me tingle and ache and then fix it—and I don’t recognize this version of myself. I don’t know who I am when I’m like this.
“I need …”
He braces his hands on my shoulders, setting me apart from him. But keeping me there, one arm’s length away. “What do you need?”
“Rules. Boundaries. I need some idea … what this is.”
He looks down toward the floor, but his gaze gets caught on my chest. I look down, too, and watch the sly grin spread over his face as he stares at my nipples poking through my shirt.
“Quit that.”
“You’re into me,” he says.
“Shut up.”
“You’re so into me. I bet you’re wet right now.”
“I bet you’re hard.”
“It’s like Thor’s mighty hammer in my pants.” He says it with a smirk.
“Didn’t the hammer have a name?”
West says something that sounds like Mole-near.
“Spell it.”
“M-j-o-l-n-i-r.”
“Jesus. Why do you know that?”
“A better question might be why we’re talking about it.”
“Because guys love talking about how big and hard their hammers are?”
“And what they want to do with them. Don’t forget.”
I ease out from under his hands and sit up on the bed again. “Yeah. That part.”
West sits next to me, but he gives me some room to think.
So I think. About his hand on his hammer. “You really did that when we were on the phone?”
He smiles, but he looks kind of sheepish. Not an expression I see on West very often.
“I mean, really-really? You’re not just saying that because you’re trying to flatter me?”
“If I wanted to flatter you, I’d tell you that shirt looks pretty on you. Or that I like your eyes. Something that’s, you know, actually nice.”
I glance down at my knees and smile.
I think about what I want and what I need, what I can take and what I can’t do without.
Maybe I’m traumatized. Maybe I’m being irrational. I don’t know.
I want West, though. Any version of West I can have, any way I can have him.
And it isn’t as though, if he were willing to give me everything, I could even take it. As my dad so recently reminded me, there’s my future to think of. There’s my reputation, which I can’t really put to the test by dating the campus drug dealer.
I don’t want to date West. I want him to show me what deeper feels like.
Deep and then deeper. All the way down.
“All right,” I tell him. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”
Twice a week. Tuesdays and Thursdays, ten o’clock to ten-fifty, while Bridget’s in class and West is in between and I’ve got nothing until lunch.
We’re not going to date, and we’re not going to tell.
Those are our rules.
I spend the time before West shows up on Thursday zoning out. Like, I keep thinking I have it together, but then my brain will wander off like a wayward child, and I’m helpless to prevent it. Bridget keeps asking me what happened with West, but I can’t say. He and I made a deal. And, anyway, what would I tell her? That I decided to be West’s friend with benefits? His fuck buddy? That we’re going to do a Get Caroline Back in the Saddle training program twice a week?
I’m smart enough to know that to anyone else this would sound like an epically bad idea. Bridget would not approve. My father would have a stroke. The Internet Asshats, predictably, think I’m a sloppy cunt who needs a good dicking, or whatever.
I’m getting kind of bored with the Internet Asshats.
I know what good girls do, and this is not it.
But I put it on my calendar, anyway, fifty minutes twice a week that I round up to an hour and shade in orange because orange feels like his color. WEST, I type.
Bridget and I string Christmas lights around the windows of the dorm room, and I go out to Walmart and buy an extra string to wrap around the posts of the bed and along the edges. When Bridget isn’t home, I turn off the overhead bulb and get under my blanket. The lights glow green and red, blue and yellow and orange.
I close my eyes, skim my fingers over my skin, thinking of West.
I have never been so excited.
He shows up right after his class. Knocks twice, then just opens the door and lets himself in. He’s got that coat again, and a textbook and notebook under one arm. He won’t quite meet my eyes.
“I was thinking,” he says, with no warm-up.
Uh-oh.
“I don’t want this to … hold you up. So I think we should agree, we’re only doing this until—until you feel ready. For something normal.”
“Like … what?”
“Scott. You need to promise me, when you’re ready to go out with Scott, or some other guy like him—some guy who wants to take you to dinner and, like, meet your dad and all that—you’ll tell me. And we’ll quit.”
With West in my room, I find it hard to remember what Scott looks like or why I would ever want anything more than I want this. But I recognize that he’s trying to do the right thing. Some version of the right thing.
I kind of love that about him. He says he’s not noble, but he’s got his own code, and he needs the boundaries, the rules, just as much as I do.
We’re going to do this, but first we’ll box it in and wall it off and find a way to make it acceptable. To make it fit.
“Ooookay,” I tell him.
That out of the way, he unlaces his boots and leaves them by the door. I’ve never seen him with his boots off before. His socks are just ordinary gray socks, and there is no reason they should make me hum with anticipation. No reason at all.
He drops his stuff on my desk, hangs his coat on my chair. He pulls his phone out and sets it on the edge of my desk right by the bed, next to my pillow.
I’m going to have my head on that pillow. West is going to kiss me, and then he’s going to look past me to the desk and see how many minutes we have left.
Fifty minutes seemed like a reasonable amount of time before. Not too long, not too short. Now it seems like an eternity. All I’ve done is kiss him, but no one kisses for fifty minutes.
This is insane.
I glance at West for reassurance, but he isn’t helping. His eyes have found the same magic spot on my floor he stared at last time he was here.
Me, I think. Look at me.
He doesn’t. So I walk to where he’s trained his gaze, find the spot, and step on it.
I step on it because, insane or not, I prepared for this hour. Plugged in the Christmas lights. Put on my favorite dark jeans, a white shirt that’s a little tighter than I’m comfortable with outside the room, a pretty bra. I brushed my hair out, left it down.
I didn’t put shoes on, though. My feet are bare, toenails painted pink, and I want West to see my feet and think about the rest of me naked. I want him to own up to his desire again, although, seriously, how many times does he have to say it before I’ll believe it? The way he grabbed me two days ago, dragged me up his thigh … I get hot flashes just thinking about it.
I get another one now, watching West’s eyes travel up from the floor spot that I’ve obliterated, over my legs, lingering at my hips, my breasts, my lips. That look is back in his eyes, covetous.
He wants to touch me.
It’s just that neither of us seems to know how.
You would think we were both virgins, rather than an Internet naked-picture sensation and … whatever West is. Not a virgin. I’m pretty sure.
Ninety percent sure.
He sits down on the mattress. “Come here.”
I do.
I sit right next to him, thigh touching thigh, and I want to look at his face.
I do look. For fifty minutes, I’m allowed to look. I’m not sure what else I’m allowed to do, but looking is okay.
His face is beautiful. The Christmas lights cast a glow over his skin, blue across his cheekbone, red behind his ear. His eyes, slightly narrowed, seem to glow. The word I think of is avid. Like whatever I’m about to do, he’s going to observe it, lean into it, take it and run with it.
I like being the thing he’s avid for, because that same feeling is inside my skin. The strain of not touching him, a low hum that’s always there, always something I’m pushing down, ignoring.
Only now I don’t have to.
As soon as I think it, my fingertips drift up to touch his neck. I turn my hand over and feel the rasp of his stubble against the backs of my fingers, the bumpy texture that smooths out lower down, until I find a spot where his skin is like hot satin.