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Twice a week. Tuesdays and Thursdays, ten o’clock to ten-fifty, while Bridget’s in class and West is in between and I’ve got nothing until lunch.
We’re not going to date, and we’re not going to tell.
Those are our rules.
I spend the time before West shows up on Thursday zoning out. Like, I keep thinking I have it together, but then my brain will wander off like a wayward child, and I’m helpless to prevent it. Bridget keeps asking me what happened with West, but I can’t say. He and I made a deal. And, anyway, what would I tell her? That I decided to be West’s friend with benefits? His fuck buddy? That we’re going to do a Get Caroline Back in the Saddle training program twice a week?
I’m smart enough to know that to anyone else this would sound like an epically bad idea. Bridget would not approve. My father would have a stroke. The Internet Asshats, predictably, think I’m a sloppy cunt who needs a good dicking, or whatever.
I’m getting kind of bored with the Internet Asshats.
I know what good girls do, and this is not it.
But I put it on my calendar, anyway, fifty minutes twice a week that I round up to an hour and shade in orange because orange feels like his color. WEST, I type.
Bridget and I string Christmas lights around the windows of the dorm room, and I go out to Walmart and buy an extra string to wrap around the posts of the bed and along the edges. When Bridget isn’t home, I turn off the overhead bulb and get under my blanket. The lights glow green and red, blue and yellow and orange.
I close my eyes, skim my fingers over my skin, thinking of West.
I have never been so excited.
He shows up right after his class. Knocks twice, then just opens the door and lets himself in. He’s got that coat again, and a textbook and notebook under one arm. He won’t quite meet my eyes.
“I was thinking,” he says, with no warm-up.
Uh-oh.
“I don’t want this to … hold you up. So I think we should agree, we’re only doing this until—until you feel ready. For something normal. ”
“Like … what?”
“Scott. You need to promise me, when you’re ready to go out with Scott, or some other guy like him—some guy who wants to take you to dinner and, like, meet your dad and all that—you’ll tell me. And we’ll quit. ”
With West in my room, I find it hard to remember what Scott looks like or why I would ever want anything more than I want this. But I recognize that he’s trying to do the right thing. Some version of the right thing.
I kind of love that about him. He says he’s not noble, but he’s got his own code, and he needs the boundaries, the rules, just as much as I do.
We’re going to do this, but first we’ll box it in and wall it off and find a way to make it acceptable. To make it fit.
“Ooookay,” I tell him.
That out of the way, he unlaces his boots and leaves them by the door. I’ve never seen him with his boots off before. His socks are just ordinary gray socks, and there is no reason they should make me hum with anticipation. No reason at all.
He drops his stuff on my desk, hangs his coat on my chair. He pulls his phone out and sets it on the edge of my desk right by the bed, next to my pillow.
I’m going to have my head on that pillow. West is going to kiss me, and then he’s going to look past me to the desk and see how many minutes we have left.
Fifty minutes seemed like a reasonable amount of time before. Not too long, not too short. Now it seems like an eternity. All I’ve done is kiss him, but no one kisses for fifty minutes.
This is insane.
I glance at West for reassurance, but he isn’t helping. His eyes have found the same magic spot on my floor he stared at last time he was here.
Me, I think. Look at me.
He doesn’t. So I walk to where he’s trained his gaze, find the spot, and step on it.
I step on it because, insane or not, I prepared for this hour. Plugged in the Christmas lights. Put on my favorite dark jeans, a white shirt that’s a little tighter than I’m comfortable with outside the room, a pretty bra. I brushed my hair out, left it down.
