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It makes it difficult to get excited about dancing with them at parties or cheering them on at a football game.
My phone vibrates in my back pocket. Bridget is texting to ask if I’m heading to lunch.
I type, Yes. You?
Yep! Gardiner?
I’m 5 min out.
Cool. Did u hear abt West?
I’m not sure how to answer that, so I type, Sort of.
She replies with *Swoon*.
Bridget likes to pretend West and I have a silent, simmering affair going on.
I like to pretend he and I are complete strangers.
The truth is somewhere in the middle.
When I met West, it was move-in day for first-year students, and it was hot. Iowa hot, which means in the mid-nineties with 98 percent humidity. The best thing to do under those conditions is to lie on a couch in someone’s cold basement and watch TV while eating Cadbury eggs. Or, if you must be outside, to seek shade and ice cream. Not necessarily in that order.
Instead, I was carrying all my earthly possessions from my dad’s car up four flights of stairs to the room I would share with Bridget. I have a lot of possessions, it turns out. I’d gotten a little dizzy on the last trip up, and my dad had insisted I plant my butt on the step by the dorm entrance and sit this one out.
So at that particular moment he was on his way up to the room, Bridget hadn’t arrived yet, and Nate was off moving into his own room on the east side of campus. I was alone—sweaty and grimy and red-faced and hot. It’s possible that I was mentally griping a bit about my tired hamstrings and the lack of trained helper monkeys to do the moving work for me when the ugliest car I have ever seen rolled up.
The car was the color of sewage, dented and rusty, with a passenger-side door that had been duct-taped on. As I watched, it cut across an open parking space and slow-motion-bounced right up over the curb onto the manicured college lawn, rolling to a stop in front of my sneaker-clad feet.
I glanced around for the RA, good-girl radar pinging like mad. There were tire tracks in the grass! The car was farting out oily-looking clouds of noxious exhaust! This could not possibly be allowed!
No RA in sight.
The driver’s-side door opened, and a guy got out.
I forgot my own name.
Now, probably that was because I stood up too quickly. It was hot, and I’d only had a Pop-Tart for breakfast, too excited to eat the eggs and bacon my dad tried to push on me. I definitely didn’t get woozy because of how this guy looked.
I mean, yes, I’ll admit, the way he looked might have contributed. The lizard part of my brain greedily took in all the details of his height and build and that mouth and his face oh my God, and then the rational part of me filed them carefully away in the appropriate mental binder.
That would be the binder neatly labeled If You Weren’t with Nate.
But it wasn’t the way the guy looked that got me. It was the way he moved.
I want to say that he swaggered out of the car, except that makes it sound like he was trying too hard, and he just obviously wasn’t. He was naturally that graceful and loose-hipped and, God, I don’t even know. You’ll have to take my word for it.
He glanced all around. His gaze settled on me. “You the welcome wagon?”
“Sure,” I said.
He stepped closer and stuck out his hand. “I’m West Leavitt. ”
“Caroline Piasecki. ”
“Nice to meet you. ”
His hand was warm and dry. It made me conscious of my clammy, gritty grip and of the sweat under my arms. My deodorant had failed hours ago, and I could smell myself. Awesome.
