Robin York - Deeper

“Yeah?”

“Hard as a fucking rock.”

He slips out the door, and I’m still smiling at it like an idiot when Bridget comes back from class.

Tuesday.

Fifty minutes.

Outside, the sky is dark. It’s snowing, blowing icy slush sideways, gray and miserable. I’ve put on Bing Crosby just to make West shake his head and pretend to lament my terrible taste in music.

His hair is cold and damp, his nose freezing when he presses it against mine, but his lips are warm. His smile is warmer. We have this dim room, this bed surrounded by color, our feet intertwined, his body pushing down on me.

We have slow, deep kisses that keep getting deeper.

I ruck up his shirt and follow the gully of his spine up. The muscles of his shoulders flex under my hands. I scoot down. My shirt hikes up. We kiss and kiss, and I find a way to wiggle until my bare stomach is touching his.

Do you feel this? Your skin and mine?

Because I feel it everywhere.

I want it. I want you.

I skate my palms up his sides. Over his shoulders, into the inner sleeves of his shirt until I run out of room over his hard biceps. His hips move into my thigh, belt buckle nipping into the top of my leg, and I press my fingernails into his skin and scoot down another fraction, seeking better alignment.

Seeking pressure between my legs.

I want the knowledge of what I do to him, the heat of what we do to each other.

When I get there, he grunts and bites my lip. His eyes are slits, his nostrils flared as he breathes in deep, fast. “Caroline.”

I lift into the ridge of heat in his jeans, loving that I can do this to him. Loving the pressure, the weight, the way his kiss gets darker and more desperate and we move together, synchronized.

It’s not sex. It’s better than sex.

It’s West.

Thursday. I wore this shirt—this joke of a shirt. It’s supposed to fall off at the shoulder. It’s supposed to be layered over another shirt, but I didn’t tell him that, and as soon as we lie down to start kissing, it comes off my shoulder and exposes my bra strap and a little bit of my bra.

Red lace.

Come on, West. Be tempted.

Everything is faster this time. His first kiss is hungry, and I’m glad because I’ve missed him, I’ve missed this, I’ve thought of nothing else for two days. His hands have a desperation in them, sliding up and down, into my hair, back to my arms. Starving.

It’s not enough anymore. These limits he drew on my body, the pencil marks faint. I want more. We both want more.

I don’t have to be sneaky in order to get him between my legs. I tug at his belt, and he’s over me, as hard and hot as I remember him but better. So much better. The way he rears up suddenly to look at me. His eyes in this light, keeping no secrets. My stomach is showing, one bra cup half out, and his hands tremble on my wrists as he pulls them overhead and crosses them on the pillow.

I’ve never felt so desirable. It’s a drug in my veins, a giddy ecstasy that makes me grin at him with well-kissed lips. Makes me powerful.

Do something , I order him with my eyes and the small, restless movements of my hips. Do something, or I will.

He sinks down, hair falling in his face, and kisses me again. He thrusts—really thrusts—and my head tilts back. My whole spine arches up, moving into him. I’m wet, and I want his fingers. I want his whole hand inside my jeans, fumbling into my panties. His mouth on my breasts. I want us to round all the bases, one after another, in the next half an hour.

“Please,” I say.

West breathes against my ear. Licks my earlobe. Bites me. “That is not a shirt.”

I grin at the bunked bed above me. “Please.”

He sits up again. “Take it off.”

Gladly. Gladly I do, and then his hands are just … everywhere.

Everywhere. More than once.

My bra hooks in the front. I show him, helpfully, and then the bra is gone and he’s kissing me again, his shark-bit T-shirt so annoying, his warm palm on my breast. Long fingers. Gorgeous, capable, intelligent hands. He knows exactly what to do. Exactly.

“Take this off,” I say, tugging at his hem, so he does, throws the shirt on the floor, comes back down on top of me, skin-to-skin, naked from the waist up— oh, my God, this is the best thing that has ever happened to anyone in the history of the universe . I slide my hands all over his back. He kisses a trail from my mouth to my jaw, down my neck.

He licks my nipple, and I die. I just die.

We are hands and arms, colored light on smooth skin, heat and sweat in the sweltering dorm room. We are kissing mouths, thrusting hips, building tension between my legs.

“Here, this can’t feel good,” he says, and yanks open his belt, pulls it out of the loops, throws it on the floor. He is a cowboy, his belt a whip. It is the sexiest four seconds of action I have ever witnessed.

I miss the pinch of his buckle into my stomach, but not for long. Not for long, because he touches my breasts. He watches me. He figures out what I like, plucks at that tension with his fingers, presses against my clit just right until I’m openmouthed, gasping, embarrassingly wet. It sneaks up on me, unexpected, because I’ve come before with a guy but never from friction, never through my jeans. Never so easy. I don’t recognize this effortless skip from good to great to unbearably amazing, but West must, because he figures out the angles and pushes himself into me in just the right spot, so hard, so perfect, until I’m coming apart against his hardness and his hands and his mouth, oh, God, his mouth.

When the alarm goes off, I’m still catching my breath, and he’s smiling like I gave him a prize.

I think maybe he gave me one. Not the orgasm, either—although the orgasm was great.

The knowledge that it can be so easy .

He does it again before he leaves, with his thigh between my legs and his mouth on my breasts. He’ll be late for class, I think, but I’m limp and my upper lip is sweating, and he licks right over it when he kisses me goodbye.

He pulls his boots back on and rakes his eyes over me, half naked, half dead from pleasure.

I’ve never felt so beautiful.

It’s the shortest fifty minutes of my life.

The end of the semester arrives, and I’m not ready for it. Back in September, it seemed like an impossible goal—to get through the days, to keep my head up, to keep going. I’m not sure when it stopped being impossible, but I know that the difference has everything to do with West.

It’s finals week, which means no class. No schedule, except for a few in-class exams I have to show up for.

No Tuesday and Thursday morning time with West.

Worse, I won’t see him for an entire month. He’s flying home to Oregon. Dad is taking Janelle and her fiancé and me to St. Maarten for Christmas, and then I’ll be hanging around home, waiting for next semester to start. Last year, I spent most of Christmas break with Nate. Now it’s like this yawning void up ahead—nothing to look forward to, and a lot to cringe away from.

Even though we don’t have class, West has work, of course, so I see him at the bakery, the library, and his apartment. Bridget and I have been hanging out with Krishna and Quinn a lot, and with West, too, when he’s around. The five of us are getting to be kind of a unit.

I hadn’t realized how much I missed being part of a group of friends until I had one again. There’s an unpredictability to it, a potential for fun—or at least for conversation, someone to talk to, something interesting to hear about. When it was just Bridget and me, I would see her in all the same places. We had fun, but I think I was sort of a fortress after August, and we were behind the walls.