Deeper (Caroline & West #1)(26)

He’s hilariously funny when he wants to be, wickedly smart, open and teasing—and then suddenly I step over some invisible line and he’s a robot. Or too intense, complaining about how something is bullshit, like he did that first night I came here.

He takes his phone into the front of the store, where I won’t be able to hear him talking.

I go back to my Latin, though it’s hard to concentrate, knowing, as I do, that in ten or fifteen minutes someone will show up at the alley door. West will meet him there, positioning his body so I can’t see who he’s talking to, mumbling in this low voice that makes him sound like just another dude, a slacker. His shoulders will slouch. His hands will dip in and out of his pockets, propelled along by his soothing, nonthreatening voice.

I try not to see. It’s better if I stick to the slices. That’s the only way we can be friends—or not-friends, I guess.

And I need to be not-friends with West. He’s the only person in my whole life who doesn’t treat me like nothing happened but who also doesn’t treat me like everything happened. He says, “How’s it going?” when I walk in the door, and I tell him the truth, but afterward that’s that. We’re done talking about it.

Tucked in my nook at the bakery, for a few hours two or three nights a week, I feel like myself.

When he comes back, he hops up on the nearest table opposite me and says, “What’s that, Latin?”

“Yeah. I’ve got a quiz tomorrow.”

“Need help with your verbs?”

“No, I’m good.”

“Are you staying long enough for me to teach you all the finer points of muffin glazing?”

“Probably not. I’ve got to write a response paper for Con Law, and I didn’t bring my laptop.”

“You should’ve. I like it when you write here.”

I do, too. He’s quiet when I need him to be quiet, and when I want a break he’ll teach me some bread thing. If I read him my draft out loud, he’ll suggest some change that sounds small but always ends up making the paper more concise, the argument stronger.

West is smart. Crazy smart. I had no idea—the one time I had a class with him, he didn’t talk.

It is possible he’s actually smarter than I am.

“Next week, then,” he says. “Tuesday you will learn the secrets of the glaze.”

I smile. I think he likes teaching me stuff nearly as much as he liked learning it in the first place. He’s almost insatiably curious. No matter what homework I’m doing, he’ll end up asking me fifty questions about it.

“Sounds good. Are you on at the restaurant this weekend?”

“Yeah. What about you, you got plans?”

I want to hang out with you. Come over Sunday, and we’ll watch bad TV.

Let’s go to the bar.

Let’s go out to dinner in Iowa City.

Sometimes I invent a life in which my being more than not-friends with West is a possibility. A life where we get to hang out somewhere other than a kitchen at midnight.

Then I mentally pinch myself, because, no, I want less scandal, not more.

“Bridget is trying to get me to go to that party tomorrow night.”

“Where’s that?”

“A bunch of the soccer players.”

“Oh, at Bourbon House?”

“Yeah, are you going?”

“I’ll be at work.”

“After you get off?”

He smiles. “Nah. You should go, though.”

When Bridget suggested it, the idea filled me with panic. A crush of bodies, all those faces I would have to study for signs of judgment, pity, disgust. I can’t have fun when I’m so busy monitoring my behavior, choosing the right clothes, plastering a just-so smile on my face and watching, watching, while the men in my head tell me I look like a whore and I should pick somebody already. Take him upstairs and let him suck my tits, because that’s all a slut like me is good for.

Bridget thinks I need to get out more, pick my life back up where I left it. Otherwise, Nate wins.

I see her point. But I can’t make myself want to.

I look at the corrugated soles of West’s boots, swinging a few feet from my face. At the way his knuckles look, folded around the edge of the table. The seam at his elbows.

If West were going to the party, I would want to.

“I might.”

“Do you some good,” he says. “Get shit-faced, dance a little. Maybe you’d even meet somebody worth keeping you busy nights so you’re not hanging around here harassing me all the time.”

He grins when he says it. Just kidding, Caro, that grin says. We both know you’re too f*cked in the head to be hooking up with anybody.

Before I’ve even caught my breath, he’s hopped down and moved toward the sink, where he fills a bucket with soapy water so he can wipe down his countertops.

I look at my Latin book, which really is verbs, and I blink away the sting in my eyes.

Video, videre, vidi, visus. To see.

Cognosco, cognoscere, cognovi, cognotus. To understand.

Maneo, manere, mansi, mansurus. To remain.

I see what he’s doing. Every now and then, West throws some half-teasing comment out to remind me I’m not his girlfriend. He smiles as he tells me something that means, You’re not important to me. We’re not friends.