Page 83 of Deeper (Caroline & West 1)
“Rules. Boundaries. I need some idea … what this is. ”
He looks down toward the floor, but his gaze gets caught on my chest. I look down, too, and watch the sly grin spread over his face as he stares at my nipples poking through my shirt.
“Quit that. ”
“You’re into me,” he says.
“Shut up. ”
“You’re so into me. I bet you’re wet right now. ”
“I bet you’re hard. ”
“It’s like Thor’s mighty hammer in my pants. ” He says it with a smirk.
“Didn’t the hammer have a name?”
West says something that sounds like Mole-near.
“Spell it. ”
“M-j-o-l-n-i-r. ”
“Jesus. Why do you know that?”
“A better question might be why we’re talking about it. ”
“Because guys love talking about how big and hard their hammers are?”
“And what they want to do with them. Don’t forget. ”
I ease out from under his hands and sit up on the bed again. “Yeah. That part. ”
West sits next to me, but he gives me some room to think.
So I think. About his hand on his hammer. “You really did that when we were on the phone?”
He smiles, but he looks kind of sheepish. Not an expression I see on West very often.
“I mean, really-really? You’re not just saying that because you’re trying to flatter me?”
“If I wanted to flatter you, I’d tell you that shirt looks pretty on you. Or that I like your eyes. Something that’s, you know, actually nice. ”
I glance down at my knees and smile.
I think about what I want and what I need, what I can take and what I can’t do without.
Maybe I’m traumatized. Maybe I’m being irrational. I don’t know.
I want West, though. Any version of West I can have, any way I can have him.
And it isn’t as though, if he were willing to give me everything, I could even take it. As my dad so recently reminded me, there’s my future to think of. There’s my reputation, which I can’t really put to the test by dating the campus drug dealer.
I don’t want to date West. I want him to show me what deeper feels like.
Deep and then deeper. All the way down.
“All right,” I tell him. “Here’s what we’re going to do. ”
