Deeper (Caroline & West #1)(51)

“You said you wouldn’t touch me.”

He nods but doesn’t look up.

“You did touch me, though.”

“I f*cking know that, Caroline.”

“Don’t get snippy with me. You don’t have any right. We were both up there. We were both kissing.”

“Yeah, but I’m the one who had to jump off the balcony, aren’t I?”

“That’s why you’re pissed at me?”

“I’m not pissed at you!”

Finally he’s looking at me, but it’s not any help. His indrawn eyebrows and scowling mouth mean he’s mad about something. If it’s not me, then what? “You sure seem like it.”

He stands up. Paces back and forth a few times. Glances at the bunked beds, Bridget’s empty desk, my cluttered one. He picks up the framed picture of me with my dad and my sisters at my high school graduation and sets it back down.

He points to the picture. “You know what I said to him?”

“Who, my dad?”

He crosses his arms. “I said, ‘So that’s your daughter?’ This was after I’d carried you up the stairs and laid you out on the bed. I stood right over you, staring at your tits, and I said, ‘I’m right across the hall. Coed dorms, man. This is going to be sweet.’”

He uses his drug-dealer voice, his stoner voice—utterly fake if you know West but convincingly awful if you don’t. I can hear exactly how it must have sounded to my dad. Like his baby girl was moving in across the hall from a date rapist, or at the very least a lecherous creep.

It’s a miracle Dad ever left Putnam.

“Why?”

“So you’d have a good reason to keep the f*ck away from me.”

“Yeah, I get that, but I don’t understand. And don’t try to feed me any garbage about me being rich and you being poor or you being too noble or whatever.”

He makes a face. Walks away toward the window, turning his back on me. “I’m not noble.”

“Then what are you?”

No answer. The silence spins out, Bridget’s Putnam College clock ticking out the seconds—one, two, three, four, five, with no answer—until suddenly West spins around and says, “I’m f*cking selfish, all right? I’ve got plans for the future, and you’re not in them. You’re not ever going to be in them, Caro, so it just makes more sense for me to keep away from you so I can focus on what’s important.”

What’s important. Which is not me.

I gaze at Smurfette on my lap, her golden puff of hair and her stupid f*ck-me shoes and her dress, and I want to punch her. I want to punch myself, right where it hurts, right where West’s words lanced into the old burning pain beneath my lungs, that vital spot he keeps hitting me in without even caring enough to mean to.

He’s not trying to hurt me. He’s just selfish.

“Don’t look like that,” he says.

“I will look however I want.” I enunciate every word, slowly and carefully, because I don’t want him to know that he’s hurt me.

I turn the pillow over. I trace the outline of Brainy Smurf’s hat. I always identified with Brainy.

“Caro—”

“Maybe you should go.”

He picks up his coat. He walks over to the door. I wait for it to open, wait for him to walk out, wait for the part of my life that doesn’t have West in it to begin.

But he stands there, and then he leans into the door and kicks it viciously, three times. He kicks the door so hard that I jump.

The hair on my arms lifts.

The violence is a bell ringing inside me. An announcement that something is beginning, something’s been unleashed.

He turns back toward me. “I don’t want to go. Okay? That’s my problem, Caroline. I never want to go.”

“What do you want, then?”

I’m almost in tears. I’m almost shouting, because I don’t know. I’ve never known.

He walks over, drops his coat on Bridget’s bunk, braces both hands on the metal framework of the bed. His feet are wide, straddling mine, blocking out the ceiling light. I can’t see his face, but when he says, “I want to kiss you again,” I can hear the softness of his mouth. I can almost feel it.

West nudges my foot with his, boxes in my knee. “I could feed you a line about how I want that because I think you need somebody to show you you’re not broken, how you’re beautiful and sexy and if you’re dirty it’s only in the good way, the way everybody is dirty. I could tell you that, and it would be true, but what’s really true is that I’m selfish and I want you. I don’t know how to stop wanting you. I’m just really f*cking tired of trying.”

He shifts slightly, letting the light loose around his head. It brightens his ear, shows me his eyes. They are hard and glittering and full of something I’ve seen there a hundred times but never knew what to call it.

Need. Greed.

This is what West looks like when he’s greedy.

His greed is for me.

I can’t think. Breathing is all I can handle. Breathing and watching him.

“I wanted you from the minute I saw you,” he says. “I want you right now, and you can barely stand me. I can barely stand me, so I don’t know why you put up with my shit, but even right now, when I hate myself and you’re pissed at me, I still want to push you down on the bed and take off your shirt and get inside you. Get deep inside you, and then deeper, until I’m so deep I don’t even know what’s me anymore and what’s you.”