Robin York - Deeper

He held himself back, and I wasn’t always brave enough. I didn’t trust myself.

We failed as often as we succeeded, West and me.

But I think about what would have happened if he hadn’t come out to get me.

I think I might have stayed in my car forever. I might have made only right turns.

I might never have learned how to stop being afraid, and those men would have kept chasing me around, always.

I can’t be anything but glad that’s not the way things went.

Instead, West came out, and I went in.

After that, I rarely wanted to be anywhere else.

“You’re buzzing again.”

I’m in my nook, a little area on the bakery floor between the sink and the long table against the wall where West lines up his mixing bowls. I like it here because I can only usually see a slice of him at a time.

I watch his boots, his pant legs from the knees down, his apron.

During this part of the night, when he’s mixing, he’s always moving. Rocking from one foot to the other if he’s feeding and stirring the sourdough starter. Pacing from the sink to the mixer to the refrigerator to the storage room, back to the mixer, back to the sink, over to the counter to pick up a tool he’s forgotten.

The way he moves is almost more than I can take. His lazy grace. His competence.

His arms come into view as he lifts one bowl off the stand and puts the next one on. He bends over, and I see his hat and his neck, his face in profile, his jeans tight over his bent leg, the shape of his calf.

I can handle him in pieces. They’re all nice pieces, but they don’t make me break out in a nervous sweat, like I did last night when it was time to head home and he walked me to the back door, propped his hand up on the jamb, and said something that made him smile down at me and lean in. I don’t know what it was. I couldn’t hear him, because the way he had his arm braced made his shirt sleeve ride up to reveal his whole biceps, a defined curve of taut muscle engaged against the doorframe. I fell into a biceps wormhole, and then I made the grave error of looking at his mouth, the shape of his lips and his cheekbones, his chin and his eyes. I forgot to listen to him.

I forgot to breathe or exist outside of West’s face.

Yeah. That’s a thing that can happen, apparently, and when it happens, it’s really bad. He had to snap his fingers in front of my nose to wake me up. It made me startle, and I stepped backward and nearly fell down. West just smiled kind of indulgently.

“Text me when you get home,” he said, and I said something that sounded like gnugh .

I guess he’s used to me being hopeless around him. We both just pretend I’m not. It sort of works.

West and I are like that. We sort of work.

I’ve been coming to the bakery two or three nights a week—almost every shift he’s on, I’m here. Insomnia has made me her bitch, but it doesn’t matter so much when I can hang out with West and study in my little nook. I nap after class. I’m turning into a creature of the night. It’s all right, though. I guess I’d rather be Bella Swan hanging out at the Cullen place than, you know, school Bella—all pissy and defensive, clomping around Forks High, convinced everyone hates her.

The men in my head are quiet when I’m at the bakery. I think if they called me names, West would glower at them and tell them to shut the fuck up. If they were real, I mean. Which they’re not.

West’s phone is still buzzing, vibrating itself partway off the edge of the tabletop. I poke out a finger and push it back to safety. “Dough boy,” I say, loud, because it’s hard to hear with the mixer going. “Your phone.”

“What?”

“Your phone.”

I point, and he finally understands. He walks over and picks it up off the metal countertop right beside me.

I made the mistake of grabbing it once, thinking I would hand it to him. The look on his face—he has this way of shutting down his whole expression so it looks like there’s no feeling in him at all.

He’s hilariously funny when he wants to be, wickedly smart, open and teasing—and then suddenly I step over some invisible line and he’s a robot. Or too intense, complaining about how something is bullshit, like he did that first night I came here.

He takes his phone into the front of the store, where I won’t be able to hear him talking.

I go back to my Latin, though it’s hard to concentrate, knowing, as I do, that in ten or fifteen minutes someone will show up at the alley door. West will meet him there, positioning his body so I can’t see who he’s talking to, mumbling in this low voice that makes him sound like just another dude, a slacker. His shoulders will slouch. His hands will dip in and out of his pockets, propelled along by his soothing, nonthreatening voice.

I try not to see. It’s better if I stick to the slices. That’s the only way we can be friends—or not-friends, I guess.

And I need to be not-friends with West. He’s the only person in my whole life who doesn’t treat me like nothing happened but who also doesn’t treat me like everything happened. He says, “How’s it going?” when I walk in the door, and I tell him the truth, but afterward that’s that. We’re done talking about it.

Tucked in my nook at the bakery, for a few hours two or three nights a week, I feel like myself.

When he comes back, he hops up on the nearest table opposite me and says, “What’s that, Latin?”

“Yeah. I’ve got a quiz tomorrow.”

“Need help with your verbs?”

“No, I’m good.”

“Are you staying long enough for me to teach you all the finer points of muffin glazing?”

“Probably not. I’ve got to write a response paper for Con Law, and I didn’t bring my laptop.”

“You should’ve. I like it when you write here.”

I do, too. He’s quiet when I need him to be quiet, and when I want a break he’ll teach me some bread thing. If I read him my draft out loud, he’ll suggest some change that sounds small but always ends up making the paper more concise, the argument stronger.

West is smart. Crazy smart. I had no idea—the one time I had a class with him, he didn’t talk.

It is possible he’s actually smarter than I am.

“Next week, then,” he says. “Tuesday you will learn the secrets of the glaze.”

I smile. I think he likes teaching me stuff nearly as much as he liked learning it in the first place. He’s almost insatiably curious. No matter what homework I’m doing, he’ll end up asking me fifty questions about it.

“Sounds good. Are you on at the restaurant this weekend?”

“Yeah. What about you, you got plans?”

I want to hang out with you. Come over Sunday, and we’ll watch bad TV.

Let’s go to the bar.

Let’s go out to dinner in Iowa City.

Sometimes I invent a life in which my being more than not-friends with West is a possibility. A life where we get to hang out somewhere other than a kitchen at midnight.

Then I mentally pinch myself, because, no, I want less scandal, not more.

“Bridget is trying to get me to go to that party tomorrow night.”

“Where’s that?”

“A bunch of the soccer players.”

“Oh, at Bourbon House?”

“Yeah, are you going?”

“I’ll be at work.”

“After you get off?”

He smiles. “Nah. You should go, though.”

When Bridget suggested it, the idea filled me with panic. A crush of bodies, all those faces I would have to study for signs of judgment, pity, disgust. I can’t have fun when I’m so busy monitoring my behavior, choosing the right clothes, plastering a just-so smile on my face and watching, watching, while the men in my head tell me I look like a whore and I should pick somebody already. Take him upstairs and let him suck my tits, because that’s all a slut like me is good for.