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I think maybe he gave me one. Not the orgasm, either—although the orgasm was great.
The knowledge that it can be so easy.
He does it again before he leaves, with his thigh between my legs and his mouth on my breasts. He’ll be late for class, I think, but I’m limp and my upper lip is sweating, and he licks right over it when he kisses me goodbye.
He pulls his boots back on and rakes his eyes over me, half naked, half dead from pleasure.
I’ve never felt so beautiful.
It’s the shortest fifty minutes of my life.
The end of the semester arrives, and I’m not ready for it. Back in September, it seemed like an impossible goal—to get through the days, to keep my head up, to keep going. I’m not sure when it stopped being impossible, but I know that the difference has everything to do with West.
It’s finals week, which means no class. No schedule, except for a few in-class exams I have to show up for.
No Tuesday and Thursday morning time with West.
Worse, I won’t see him for an entire month. He’s flying home to Oregon. Dad is taking Janelle and her fiancé and me to St. Maarten for Christmas, and then I’ll be hanging around home, waiting for next semester to start. Last year, I spent most of Christmas break with Nate. Now it’s like this yawning void up ahead—nothing to look forward to, and a lot to cringe away from.
Even though we don’t have class, West has work, of course, so I see him at the bakery, the library, and his apartment. Bridget and I have been hanging out with Krishna and Quinn a lot, and with West, too, when he’s around. The five of us are getting to be kind of a unit.
I hadn’t realized how much I missed being part of a group of friends until I had one again. There’s an unpredictability to it, a potential for fun—or at least for conversation, someone to talk to, something interesting to hear about. When it was just Bridget and me, I would see her in all the same places. We had fun, but I think I was sort of a fortress after August, and we were behind the walls.
Now when I walk across campus, I run into Quinn on the quad. She’s trying to talk me into buying rugby shoes. She’s planning a big party for right after break, and she wants me to help her with organizing. Quinn’s been running the rugby club single-handed since the end of last year. I think she wants to recruit me to the dark side.
I walk out of Latin and see Krishna, and he and I head in the same direction, talking about nothing. TV. What his mom sent him in the mail. What he’s up to for Christmas.
The pictures are still out there, but they’re no longer everything I see when I look around. The first report I got from the service I hired is only a page long, miserly about details. I shrug it off, just happy to have it be someone else’s responsibility.
West fills a lot of the space in my head where the pictures used to be. He crowds out my concentration when I’m trying to review my notes at the library. He pushes his cart past, earbuds in, eyebrows lifted in an understated hello.
I get one look at that smirk and I’m a goner, back in my bed, under the lights. Under him.
I can’t concentrate for an hour.
During our usual Tuesday meeting time, I keep glancing at my bed, surprised by how much I miss him. The next night we hang out at the bakery, and I want to touch him, but Krishna’s there, and I’m not allowed, anyway. Not at the bakery. Not in the library. Not where anyone could see.
I sit in my nook on the floor, flipping through my Latin flash cards, and when I look up he’s staring at me from across the table.
He’s got flour on the bridge of his nose. Dusted over his forearms.
He’s got his jeans and boots on, and he’s measuring ingredients, scraping bowls, emptying fifty-pound bags of flour into the wheeled bin. I can’t stop thinking about this scene
I saw in a movie once, where the man and the woman had sex with her sitting at the edge of a table and all their clothes still on, just shoved down out of the way.
It certainly wouldn’t be sanitary, but I have a feeling I wouldn’t care.
“What are you up to after this?” West asks.
It’s toward the end of the shift. Krishna has left. He’s done with his finals already, heading home to Chicago for the holiday.
“I’m going to grab a nap, and then I have my English paper to write still. ”
“That’s your last thing, right?”
“Yeah. It’s due Friday. ”
“You gonna be able to sleep?”
