Robin York - Deeper

West nudges my foot with his, boxes in my knee. “I could feed you a line about how I want that because I think you need somebody to show you you’re not broken, how you’re beautiful and sexy and if you’re dirty it’s only in the good way, the way everybody is dirty. I could tell you that, and it would be true, but what’s really true is that I’m selfish and I want you. I don’t know how to stop wanting you. I’m just really fucking tired of trying.”

He shifts slightly, letting the light loose around his head. It brightens his ear, shows me his eyes. They are hard and glittering and full of something I’ve seen there a hundred times but never knew what to call it.

Need. Greed.

This is what West looks like when he’s greedy.

His greed is for me.

I can’t think. Breathing is all I can handle. Breathing and watching him.

“I wanted you from the minute I saw you,” he says. “I want you right now, and you can barely stand me. I can barely stand me, so I don’t know why you put up with my shit, but even right now, when I hate myself and you’re pissed at me, I still want to push you down on the bed and take off your shirt and get inside you. Get deep inside you, and then deeper, until I’m so deep I don’t even know what’s me anymore and what’s you.”

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?