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“You made that on purpose?” I ask.
Raffe smiles. If he were wearing overalls, he’d stick his thumbs under the straps and rock back and forth on his heels—he looks that proud. “Yep.”
“Why?”
Annie groans. “Don’t ask him why.”
“But—”
Then West is beside me, dragging me across the room by the elbow. “Never mind Raffe,” he says. “Look at this.”
There’s a smear of something dark on his cheekbone. His T-shirt is spattered with white spots that I would swear weren’t there when he left the apartment this morning. He’s wearing the jeans he wears for art stuff, the denim almost impossible to spot under a layer of paint and slip and grease and I don’t even know what.
Those jeans turn my crank so hard.
So hard. Seriously, he can’t ever be allowed to know. He’ll hold it over me with his knowing smirks and bossy teasing.
To conceal my lust, I only allow myself quick sidelong glances at his thighs, where he’s rubbed every possible art substance off his hands. The marks of all the projects that have engaged him this semester.
There are so many of them. I think if he were anyone but West, I might be worried that all the projects were a sign of some kind of manic disorder, but I know him too well to worry. I know what it means when West sits me down and says, “Close your eyes,” and starts rustling around in one of the cabinets built into the room’s walls.
It means he’s found something he’s excited about.
It means he’s got something he wants to show me.
It means he’s finally figuring out how to let himself try stuff, make mistakes, waste materials, fail.
I’ve never seen him so happy.
He slides his sketchbook across the table in front of me, flipped open to a page about halfway through. “Look at that,” he says.
I see what looks like an exploded diagram of a tree. Trunk, roots, branches, all of them separated out with space between them, floating in the air. It isn’t a picture that makes sense to me, and it makes less sense when West starts piling tree parts and metal rods on the table in front of me.
He’s assembling the pieces, telling me about drill bits and cutting tools and how he tried Lucite but it was too obvious, and then he started thinking about copper pipe, the kind of fittings you use for doing plumbing, and how that would look if he fitted the pieces together that way, and Laurie suggested he look into the kind of piping that chemists use, the old-fashioned systems, because they have a kind of elegance, so he did some research on that …
He talks and talks, the words rushing out of him, and the whole time he’s moving. Shifting from foot to foot, reaching up to fit one piece of pipe onto another, threading fittings together.
I have this thing for the way West moves.
It’s worse than the jeans thing.
Especially worse because he knows about it.
When West is working, and happy, he gets into this physical kind of flow that unhinges the door on my libido and just lets everything out. I watch the muscles beneath his skin bunch and release. I watch his thighs in those jeans, his ass, his shoulders. Mostly, though, I watch his mouth, because I love to see him animated, love it when he’s got this much to say about something that makes him happy.
And because it’s always his mouth for me. That mouth, and the way he moves, and the way he is, so … West. Even more West than he used to be.
More West every day.
“What do you think?” he asks.
“Hmm?”
He cocks his head. “You weren’t listening to me.”
“I was.”
His eyes narrow, and one corner of his mouth tips up. “You weren’t. You’ve got that look.”
