Deeper (Caroline & West #1)(84)

“Maybe it’s some of what I wanted.”

I lean in, on solid ground at last. “I’ll woo you until you can’t walk, sweetheart.”

“Promises, promises.”

She closes her eyes when I kiss her, but I keep mine open.

I want to watch the sun rise.



I think it’s supposed to be awkward—walking to her car, the night cold enough to freeze my balls off. Driving to my apartment with the heat blasting and quiet all around us.

We go up the fire escape, leave our shoes by the door, pass through the common area into my bedroom. I hang my coat over my desk chair and sit down on the bed, legs stretched out, back against the wall.

She considers for a moment, then does the same thing.

We’re side by side on my bed, and I keep waiting for it to go wrong, to feel wrong, but all I can feel is relief, if relief feels like walking with nothing dragging behind you after you’ve been towing a trailer of misery around for most of your life.

I turn a little so I can look at her.

Her hair’s still all screwed up. She’s got crud at the inside corner of one eye, and her bottom lip has a raised elliptical pad on it like you get when your lips are too dry because of the weather or because you’ve been biting them.

Which she does, while I watch. She catches her lip between her teeth, sucks it into her mouth, releases it with grooved white lines that pink up as I watch.

I want to devour her.

I’m pretty sure it’s not time yet.

“You have to tell me what you need me to do now,” I say. “I mean, you want to talk, but I’m not sure … I’m complete shit at this.”

It’s another kind of relief, it turns out. To be shit at it, and to just be able to say so.

“This being, what? Girls?” She’s smiling.

“Yeah, you’d love for me to admit that.”

“It would make me pretty happy to hear you say you’re shit with girls, yeah.”

“You didn’t used to have any complaints about my skills.”

“But that was, like, a practice environment. Make-out homework.”

“You’re saying I might be the kind of person who can’t hack it in a real-world application.”

She turns toward me, resting her shoulder against the wall. “I’m saying I have a feeling you’ve never had a girlfriend before.”

“That’s true,” I tell her. “I’ve been with girls but I’ve never—”

I think about how to put it, and I start to tie myself up in knots before I remember that it’s just Caroline and me. I get more than one shot at putting it right if it comes out wrong the first time.

“You’re the first girl I ever cared about this way.”

I thought admitting that to Caroline would be like taking a piece of myself and handing it to her.

It is.

And it isn’t.

It’s more like … like there’s all this stuff I’ve packed into myself, a defense against what I’m afraid of. Rocks and dirt, bits of rebar and junk that I’ve found by the roadside. And what I’m giving her isn’t me, it’s a clawed-off piece of this barrier that I’ve gotten used to thinking of as me.

I don’t need it. Not to keep me safe from her.

She’s smiling, looking down at her hands where they’re laid out on the bed. Just an inch or so from my hands. She nudges her fingers over until they overlap the tips of mine. “You know what the magic word was, at my room?”

“No, what?”

“Boyfriend.” She glances at my face, then back down. “That’s why I came with you. Because you said that.”

“I should’ve said it a long time ago.”

I mean it, too. I wish I’d been able to. I wish I hadn’t wasted every night I might have been able to spend with her. “Friend. Boyfriend. You deserved both.”

She reaches up to touch my face. Her fingers stroke over my forehead, past my temple, over my cheekbone, curling into a loose fist so she can skate her knuckles over my mouth. “You’ll really tell me anything?”

“Yeah.” The word is a whisper, the movement of my lips against her skin.

“If I asked you why you got so upset when I gave you that money at Christmas …”

God damn. Way to pick a woman who goes for the throat.

“Yes. If you asked me.”

She sits, watching me for a moment.

“If I asked you why you came out to my car that night at the bakery?”

I nod and turn her hand over. Kiss her palm. It’s corny, I guess, but I’m just so f*cking happy she’s here.

“How many … partners you’ve had.”

I kiss her wrist. “Yes.”

“How you feel about me.”

“Yes.”

But I think maybe she knows that already. I think it’s there when I look at her, when she looks at me. If it wasn’t already there, we wouldn’t have lasted so long. We wouldn’t have put each other through so much when it would’ve been easier to just not.

I like her, and I love her, and I want her.

If she asks, I’ll tell her.

For now, though, because I want to and she’s staring at my lips, I kiss her neck. I find her pulse and pause there, lick it, imagining the rush of blood and heat at her throat. Flattering myself that her heart’s beating faster because of me.