Deeper (Caroline & West #1)(16)

But this time Krishna was standing at one end of the hall, twenty feet from a neat arrangement of pins, and winding his chicken through several tight arm revolutions. As I watched, he let go, an underhand throw that whipped the chicken through the air with surprising speed. It hit the pins, and they exploded, scattering all over the hall. Bridget shrieked, then bent over, laughing.

It was totally juvenile—the game, Bridget’s girlish reaction, Krishna’s red eyes and his stoned grin. I had a paper due in the morning and a lot of polishing still to do. I had Latin homework to get through, and if I had to go to the library because of these guys, I’d—

Suddenly the door right across from mine opened. West came out with a chicken in each hand and a two-liter bottle of soda under one arm. “Okay, so here’s what I’m thinking about chicken rockets,” he said, before he caught sight of me and stopped.

We looked at each other. Probably not for ten entire minutes, but that’s how it felt. Like an indecently long time spent staring at his face, when I almost never allowed myself more than a glance. A day of watching his mouth twitch. His nostrils flare. His too-pale blue-green eyes lit up with mischief.

I got all tangled up in those eyes of his, mentally tripped and fell, and then couldn’t untangle myself.

West arched an eyebrow. “Want to play?”

He didn’t mean anything by it. I’m almost sure.

Or, I mean, he did, but all he meant was, if I said yes, I’d get a chicken of my own and a free pass to indulge in this silliness, blow off my homework, act like a different girl.

He didn’t mean did I want him. Did I want to learn how to cut loose. Did I wish I could be different.

But, even so, my heart beat like a bass drum in a halftime show, and I couldn’t quite catch my breath to answer, No, thanks.

This isn’t for me.

You’re not for me.

The denial was too thick in my throat. If I tried to say it out loud, I would choke on no, because I wanted to say yes.

In the end, I didn’t say anything. Nate came up behind me and wrapped his arm around my waist, resting his chin on my shoulder. “What’s with all the noise?”

A door shut behind West’s eyes. His face closed off, and the tipping point where I was standing flattened out beneath my feet into the familiar, unexceptional terrain of my hallway, my state, my whole boring life.

“Just blowing off some steam,” West said.

“Could you keep it down, maybe?” Nate asked. “We’re trying to study.”

“Sure thing.”

Nate pulled me inside, closed the door, kissed my neck. His hands roamed under my shirt, over my bra, and then I stopped him because Bridget was in the hallway and I had a paper to write.

And also because I felt deflated, as though some rich possibility had been taken from me. Something more than a juvenile game of hallway bowling.

The alchemy of a boy who could turn two-liter soda bottles into chicken rockets.

I wonder, sometimes, whether the pull I felt toward West is the reason why I broke up with Nate. Whether it gathered power until it got so strong, it cast a shadow over all my other feelings, and I didn’t even realize it.

When I think about Nate, about West, it’s hard for me to tell what’s my fault and what isn’t.

When I sleep, there’s no peace in it. I dream of being chased, attacked, hurt. In my dreams, I’m a victim, and the dreams start to feel more real than the daytime does.

Semitrucks idle behind the Walmart and the grocery store. The guy at the gas station has gotten to know who I am, and he asks how things are going when I pay for gas and orange juice. He’s in his forties, with a salt-and-pepper beard and a gut. He seems like a nice man, but how nice can he be, really, working the night shift at the Kum and Go?

Even the name of the gas station is too gross. Before, I thought it was funny. Now it gives me flashbacks, and I’ve started driving twenty miles to the next town to buy gas there, because I can no longer talk to the Kum and Go guy without wondering if he’s seen me with my clothes off.

I drive by knots of drunk students walking back to the college from the bar or the pub, gripping one another’s elbows, laughing and shoving. One time I saw a girl fall down. She was alone with a guy, and I thought he was going to rape her, but he helped her up. I pulled the car over and took deep breaths, close to hyperventilating. Because, seriously, what on earth is wrong with me that I thought that?

I never would have, before. Never.

I don’t want to be like this for the rest of my life. If I had an undo button, I’d hit it so hard. But if there’s some way to go back to how I was before, I haven’t found it.

Most nights, I end up at the bakery.

I tell myself I won’t, but I do.

I’m under strict personal orders to stop driving here, stop parking out front, stop looking through the window for a glimpse of West.

Yet here I am.

Light spills from the kitchen in the back of the shop, through the plate glass and over the sidewalk. I set the emergency brake but leave the engine idling. With the car stopped, my music sounds too loud, so I lean forward to turn it down.

I imagine it’s warm in the kitchen and it smells good. The mental taste of it is sweet, an antidote to all the hours I spend on my laptop, sifting through the worst that humanity has to offer.

West’s figure crosses the doorway. By the time I’m standing up, one hand holding the door open and the other tucking my keys into my hoodie, he’s already disappeared. A gust of cold wind blows across my exposed feet and over the back of my neck. I hunch down, pushing my fists deeper into the kangaroo pocket of my hooded sweatshirt.