Deeper (Caroline & West #1)(55)

I get them. I get West, his mouth, his weight, his smell.

We kiss.

The lines we’ve drawn on our bodies aren’t important. They’re just pencil marks we need to put around this thing that’s so big, it could get scary if we let it.

Kissing West is my hands in his hair, on his neck, spanning his shoulders. It’s clutching his back when he plunges his tongue into my mouth, finding his waist, sneaking my hands under his shirt to steal the heat and smoothness of his skin.

It’s his body above me, his chest on me, a heavy crush I can’t get enough of because he’s always been so far away and now he’s here. His palm cradling my head, his fingers curled around my shirt at the shoulder, fisted in a tight grip because they want to wander and he won’t let them.

It’s his pale eyes, a rim of bluish color around huge dark pupils, his eyelashes long and his eyelids sleepy.

It’s the sighing weight of his forehead on mine when he has to breathe.

Lazy heat. Connection. Safety and quiet in a place where I’ve been alone and afraid and the voices in my head have been loud for weeks now. Months. He casts a spell on me, throws me into a gorgeous daze where I could kiss him forever and be perfectly content.

We have fifty minutes.

The thought is fingers snapping in my consciousness. Fifty minutes. How many are left? My lips feel full, bruised, tender and slick. I can’t remember ever kissing this much. Surely I must have, with Nate, in the early months we were dating? But when I think that far back, I mostly remember arguments. We would kiss, and then he would want more and I’d stop him, and he would get distant, huffy, pained.

You don’t know what it’s like, Caroline.

West is carrying his weight on one elbow, his legs and hips off to the side. I don’t know if he’s hard. I haven’t cared, haven’t thought. I’ve been too busy kissing, and I don’t know what it’s like.

Cocktease, the Internet Asshats say, but this time they’re right. I just forgot. I forgot about him.

I break the kiss so I can crane my head around and look at the time on the phone. Ten minutes left. We’ve been kissing for thirty-five, forty minutes, and I haven’t thought. But ten minutes should be long enough, if we need to do something different. Finish West off.

The thought is spiky, uncomfortable.

I ask him, “Are you … ?”

“Mmm.”

He’s mouthing my neck. Paying zero attention to my attempt to question him.

I curl my fingers around the thick leather of his belt. Bring them to the buckle, heavy and threatening.

I pull the leather from the loop.

West’s hand covers mine. “What are you doing?”

“If you’re … you have class, so …”

West rolls away and sits up. He has to duck his head because of the bunked beds. “I have class?”

“I don’t want you to …” I can’t say it. “Forget it.”

He grabs my chin and turns my head and makes me look at him. He won’t let me look away. It’s freaking annoying, and I hate it.

“Trust me,” he says. “I need this to be—need us to do this right. With you talking to me, telling me what you like, nobody trying to just guess or do stuff they don’t necessarily want to. I need it.”

I can’t say no to that. To anything he needs. As much as I hate to, I have to tell him.

“I thought you were maybe uncomfortable. From so much … from kissing me, maybe that was making you … hard, and if we only had a few minutes left before class, I’d better … finish it.”

He sits there, watching me with his eyebrows drawn in. I can’t tell what he’s thinking—if he’s angry or frustrated, confused, or maybe wishing he were somewhere else. With some girl who isn’t such a mixed-up freak.

Then he leans toward me, catches me by the waist, and pulls me into his lap.

He kisses my hair, right by my ear. “He really did a number on you, huh?”

I think about saying, Who? or No, but I’m trembling, and my mouth tastes like battery acid, so, yeah.

Yeah. I guess he did.

“I have to go in a minute,” West says quietly. “I don’t want to. But I have to.”

“I know.”

“I like kissing you, Caro.” He puts his lips to my neck. His arm is wrapped around my back, his hand heavy at my hip. The weight of it—perfect. “You like kissing me?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

His mouth moves down to my shoulder, to the sliver of exposed skin at the neckline of my shirt. To the hollow behind my ear, where his breath makes me shiver. He finds my mouth, and then our lips meet again, hot and wet and perfect, perfect.

“You like that?” His voice is a growl, a low thrum, explicit as fingers between my legs.

“Yes.”

“That’s it, then. You like it. I like it. Beginning, middle, end. There’s no finish. This is the whole thing, right now.”

He’s kissing me again, so I can’t think about whether or not what he said is true. I just wrap my arms around his neck, rake through his hair, outline his ear with my fingertip, and kiss him back. Under the Christmas lights, in our cave. Kisses chasing kisses, hands and mouths.

Everything. Everything.

And then we run out of time. It takes me a second to figure out that the beeping I hear is his phone.