Deeper (Caroline & West #1)(24)

“Like what? Worrying over the size of your ears isn’t going to fill much of my time. I’ll still have, like, twenty-three and a half hours a day to worry in.”

“What are you saying, you only care about my ears half an hour’s worth?”

“Maybe not even that. I have to be honest with you.”

“Please. Be honest.”

“Okay. The thing is, if I never have to see another guy’s ears so long as I live? I’ll be a happy girl.”

“Now you’re starting to sound bitter.”

“Maybe I am bitter. Maybe I’ve just seen waaaay too many close-ups of ears lately.”

“Red, swollen ears?”

She leans in, like she’s telling me a big secret. “Veiny, horrible, giant, disgusting, dripping ears.”

That cracks me up.

“What is it with you guys taking pictures of your ears?” She’s all indignant now. “It’s like you’re so proud of them.”

“If you could make stuff shoot out of your ears, you’d be proud, too.”

She’s biting her lip, looking away toward the mixer like it’s going to rescue her from the fact that we just had a conversation about dicks, and she wants to laugh but she won’t let herself. “I think we need a new topic.”

“Something more polite?”

“Yes.” Then she glances up at me from under her eyelashes, and, for one hot second, she’s wicked. “Something a little less lubricated.”

I have to look away from her. Take a breath.

I point at a lump of dough. “Wash your hands, and I’ll let you knead that.”

“Will you, now?”

“I will. I’m going to teach you to make the best sourdough loaf in Putnam County.”

“Is anybody else in Putnam County making sourdough loaves?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

She makes a face at the bread, but she’s pulling her sweatshirt over her head. “All right. I’m game.”

The shirt she’s got on underneath—it’s got to be her pajama shirt. She’s not wearing a bra.

I get four more loaves ready while she’s washing her hands at the sink. It takes two before I’ve managed to push the surprise away.

I do another one with my eyes closed, willing the soft bounce of her breasts from my head.

When she comes back from the sink, her face is serious. “Listen. I’m … I’m just going to say this. I meant what I told you at the library.”

“Which thing you told me?”

She’s picking at her thumb with her fingernail. “I can’t be your friend. Or—or anything else.”

I get it.

Doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, a little, to hear it again, but I really do get it.

For all that I had my reasons for not talking to her last year, she’s got her own reasons, too. There was Nate. There was her dad, who hated my guts even before I set about deliberately lighting his fuse. But underneath all that, there was this other thing.

Caroline’s not the kind of girl who gets mixed up with a guy who’s dealing. She’s the type who plays it safe, does what she’s supposed to, follows all the rules.

Maybe if I were who I’m pretending to be when I’m at Putnam, me and Caroline would be possible, but I’m not. We don’t make sense together.

It’s fine.

“Tell you what,” I say. “Tonight I’m going to show you how to make a decent loaf and bake it. If you come back tomorrow, I’ll teach you something else. We don’t need to be friends. We can just do this … you know, this nighttime thing. If you want to.”

“Can we?”

“When Bob’s not here, it’s my bakery. I can do whatever I want as long as I get the bread made.”

“And you won’t …”

When she looks right at me, my hands twitch.

You won’t, West.

You f*cking won’t.

“We’ll make bread and be not-friends. You don’t have to come within ten feet of my ears. I don’t want that from you, anyway.”

What’s one more lie on top of all the others?

She pokes experimentally at the dough in front of her. “All right. Show me how you do this thing, then.”

I show her, and then I show her the rest of it. She stays until her loaf comes out of the oven. By then she’s yawning.

I send her home to bed with warm bread tucked under her arm. I make her text me when she’s back at the dorm, safe behind a locked door.

The next night, she comes back.

She keeps coming back, and I keep letting her.

That’s how I get to be not-friends with Caroline Piasecki.





NOVEMBER

Caroline




When I think of the bakery, I think of all of it together.

The crunch of fall leaves piled up on the threshold of the back door where they’d blown down the alley and stuck.

The gleam of the mixing bowls and countertops underneath the banked fluorescents when West finished cleaning and locked up.

The smell of baking bread, the crumbling clay of live yeast between my fingers, West’s voice behind my ear as he leaned over my shoulder and watched me drop it into the bowl, saying, “Just like that. Exactly.”