Deeper (Caroline & West #1)(23)

“Terrible.” She looks at the floor. “Every day,” she whispers. “Every single day is the worst day of my life.”

I flour the table in front of me, preparing to shape the loaves.

Bread practically makes itself, if you do it right. You just have to quit fighting it.

Caroline watches my hands. The way my fingers shape and pinch, set the bread on a tray to rise—I have a way of making not fighting it look like fighting it. I guess I’ve been digging my heels in so long, it’s hard to remember there’s another way to do things.

I don’t think I was ever like Caroline, though. Never privileged like her, confident of my place in the world, thinking the future was some gilded egg I could pluck out of the nest and take home. I’ve always known the world isn’t fine, that it’s broken, that it fails you when you least expect it to.

When you know that, it’s easier to take the blows. Automatic to fight back.

“I can’t make it go away,” she says softly. “Not by myself. Not without …”

“Not without what?”

Her nose wrinkles. “Telling my dad.”

“What can he do that you can’t?”

“Lots of things, potentially. But mainly there’s this company you can hire to scrub your name online. Push the bad results down in the search engines. But it’s expensive.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah.”

“That sucks.”

“It does.”

“So what else is new?”

She blinks at me, obviously not expecting the change of subject. “Not much,” she says.

“Huh.” I push some dough in her direction. “You want to try this?”

“No, thanks.”

“C’mon, I’ll show you how.”

“Thank you, but no. I think my talents lie elsewhere.”

She sounds so much like the old Caroline that I almost smile. “No problem.”

She starts to wander around the room again.

“Have you thought about anything at all besides naked pictures since they first popped up … when, early last month?”

“August twenty-fourth.” She tilts her head, considering. “Yes.”

“What else have you been thinking about?”

Caroline peers into the clean mixer. When she puts her finger inside the bowl and traces the curve of it—the curve I polished until it was shiny enough to attract her attention—I don’t tell her to stop, even though I’ll have to clean it again after she goes.

She can touch whatever she wants.

“My constitutional law class. Latin homework. My sister’s wedding coming up. Whether my dad is eating okay now that I’m not at home to nag him. How to cover up the circles under my eyes. Rape. Evil. Whether law school admissions committees routinely Google applicants or just in special circumstances.”

She glances at me. “If I should get the space between my teeth fixed. The usual.”

“Sure you don’t want to pile on a few more things? Global warming, maybe? Declining newspaper circulations?”

She almost smiles. “What do you think about?”

I guess I’m supposed to make a list, too, but f*ck that.

I’ve got three years of undergrad before I can start med school, followed by four years to become a doctor, another four or five to become an anesthesiologist, and then years of hard work to build a practice. I’ve got three jobs, Frankie to think about, Mom to take care of.

Maybe what I can have of Caroline is this little slice of space and light in the darkest hours of the night. I can give her permission to not be fine. Let her talk about what’s bugging her. Distract her from her problems.

If she wants to come here, I’ll do all that, but I won’t make her problems into mine, and I’m not going to bare my f*cking soul to her.

“My ears, mostly,” I say. “You really think they’re too small?”

I touch them with my flour-covered hands, trying to look self-conscious. It works—she smiles.

That gap between her teeth kills me. I need to measure it with my tongue.

“Are you sure they’re full-grown?” she asks. “Because my dentist told me that it might be a few years before my wisdom teeth finish coming in. Maybe it’s the same with your ears.”

“You’re saying I might hit a growth spurt. Grow some manlier ears.”

“It’s possible.”

“You know what they say, though. Small ears, big equipment.”

“That is so not what they say.”

“No? Maybe it’s only in Oregon they say that.”

She laughs, a husky sound. I don’t like how it slips over me. I don’t like how I can just about feel myself filing it away in the stroke book for later—Caroline laughing as I unhook her bra. Still smiling when I take off those shapeless sweatpants and see what she’s got on underneath. What she looks like naked.

You already know what she looks like naked.

Everybody does.

I shake off the whole train of thought. Doesn’t matter, and it’s not happening between her and me, anyway.

“Here’s my point, though,” I say. “There’s all this other shit you could be worrying about, and you’re wasting too much worry on something you can’t fix.”