Robin York - Deeper

“Seriously, Krish, you’re being a jackass,” Quinn says.

“We’ve got to find her a hookup. After Thanksgiving, I’m going to make it my personal goal in life to get Caroline some action.”

“Caroline can get her own action,” Bridget says. “I mean, if she even wanted to, which—”

“Which I don’t.”

“Because you’re traumatized,” Quinn says.

“I’m not traumatized .”

I’m flustered and hot. I’m hoping, rather desperately, that the prickling in my nipples doesn’t mean the headlights are on and everyone in the room can see what West is doing to me, right in front of them.

“It’s all right,” Quinn says. “Nobody’s judging you. This is your safe zone.”

“Caroline doesn’t need a safe zone,” Bridget says. “She’s doing great. Tell them about—”

She sees my face and stops, but it’s too late.

“What?” Krishna asks.

“Nothing.”

“Doesn’t sound like nothing.”

“It’s nothing. Really.” I reach forward for my drink, breaking contact with West because things are about to turn ugly. I can feel it. The air has gotten heavy. My arousal has fled like a rabbit startled back into its hole.

I knock back a big gulp of butterscotch schnapps and start to choke again , which is a tactical error, because while I’m debilitated, Krishna goes after Bridget.

“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.