I’ve never done this before.
I’ve never initiated a conversation with West.
It feels more intimidating than it should, not only because of who he is—the forbiddenness of him—but also because this is the fourth floor. It’s an unwritten rule of Putnam that the fourth floor of the library is a space of sacred silence.
West grabs another book. He has to reach above his head to shelve it, which means his shirt lifts and I see he’s got a thick brown leather belt holding his jeans up. It doesn’t match. His boots are black, and so is his T-shirt. It’s got this big jagged orange seam sewn across the back, as though a shark came along and bit a giant rip in it and then he handed it over to a seven-year-old to fix.
I can’t imagine how such a T-shirt even happens. Or why anyone would wear it.
West’s clothes are sometimes like that. Just … random.
I kind of like it.
When he lowers down to his heels and bends over the cart, his shirt rides up again, exposing some of his lower back.
I clear my throat, but his music must be too loud, because he doesn’t turn toward me. I step closer. He’s got his head down, his hand reaching for a book on the lower shelf.
Crap. Now I’m so close that I’m bound to startle him when he finally figures out I’m here.
There’s nothing I can do to prevent it. I reach out, meaning to touch him just long enough to get his attention, but I end up pressing my palm flat against his lower spine instead.
It’s an accident. I’m almost sure it’s an accident.
Eighty percent sure.
He doesn’t jump. He just goes completely, utterly still. So still that I can hear the music playing over his earbuds. It’s loud, with angry vocals and an insistent, pounding beat that matches the sudden pulse between my legs.
Oh, I think.
Maybe it’s not an accident, after all.
West’s back is indecently hot beneath my palm. I stare at my fingers, ordering them to move for several long seconds before they actually obey. When I pull my hand away, it feels magnetized. Like there’s this drag, this force, tugging it back toward West.
I’m pretty sure the force is called lust.
West straightens and turns around, and I know even before he does it that I’ve miscalculated, and now I’m totally at his mercy, which means I’m doomed. I’m not sure he has mercy. He sure didn’t seem like he did when he was hitting Nate hard enough to make me physically ill.
He pulls out his earbuds, and I try to think something other than the word doomed. Doomed, doomed, doomed.
I try to remember what I was going to say to him—I had a whole speech planned—but I can’t. I can’t.
I stare at his belt instead. I think about grabbing it and yanking him closer. As if this is a thing I could do. A thing I have ever done, with anyone, much less West Leavitt.
Doooooomed.
“Hey,” he says.
Which isn’t fair, because it means I have to look up.
I do, eventually.
Our eyes meet. His pupils are huge, and there’s something so intense about the way he’s looking at me, it’s kind of scary. Only scary is the wrong word. I’ve felt a lot of scary in the past few weeks, and this is different.
This is scary like pausing at the top of the steepest hill on a roller coaster, bracing yourself for the drop.
“Hey,” I say back.
“What’s up?”
“Can I talk to you?”
He considers this request. “No.”
It’s not what I was expecting him to say. All I can come up with is “Oh.”
Then it’s silent again except for his music, and there’s this … this atmosphere. I think it must be him. I think he’s making the atmosphere with his skin and his eyes, which look almost silver right now, and maybe he’s also making it with all the muscles in his forearms, which are clenching and unclenching his hands in this way that’s just—
It’s just something. Intense, I guess. Menacing, but without the menace.
I have never stood this close to him before. I’ve never been alone with him since the day he parked his car right next to my feet and made me pass out.
I’ve never felt this excited, awkward, and senselessly worried in my whole entire life.
Until he takes a step toward me. That’s worse.
Better, too.
Better-worse. It’s totally a thing.
I back up.
He’s supposed to stop stepping toward me when I back up, but he doesn’t. He keeps coming. He moves right into my zone of personal space, and I get pinned up against the stacks, my butt pressing against a low shelf, West’s hands braced on either side of my head.
“I’m working,” he says. As though I’m a book, and he’s shelving me.
I try to say, I’ll come back later, but instead I make this sort of clicking, gargling noise that makes me sound like a bullfrog. I can feel my throat flushing—always a dead giveaway that I’m embarrassed. I clear it and manage to say, “That’s fine. I can … come back. Or I’ll c-call you.”
I don’t have his phone number. Or any intention of calling him.
I don’t know why I’m imagining I can feel the heat off his skin, because that’s impossible. He isn’t that close, surely. I cast my eyes up, trying to visually measure the number of inches between our faces.
It’s not very many inches at all.
West doesn’t touch me, but he is much closer than he needs to be, and the way he’s looking down at me, his chest rising and falling rapidly, color high in his cheeks—I can’t help but think about his fist connecting with Nate’s mouth. The way Nate fell to the floor, heavy and limp.
He did that for you, I think.
I came here to ask him, but I already know.
He did it for me, and this is how he looked afterward. Dilated everywhere, his skin warm and his breathing rapid and shallow.
This is how he would look in bed.
I close my eyes, because I need to get my bearings. I had imagined a businesslike talk with West. Please don’t do that again, I would say. Okay, if that’s the way you feel about it, he’d reply. Yes, that’s the way I feel, I would tell him. Then maybe I’d give him a lecture about the importance of settling conflict without violence, followed by a brisk handshake.
I didn’t imagine the ruddy skin of his neck right by the collar of his shirt. The stubble on his jaw where it curves into his ear. I didn’t anticipate his smell, like spearmint and library books, detergent and warm skin.
God, he smells fantastic, but he’s also kind of scary, and I have no idea what the rules are right now. No idea at all.
I need rules to get through this. I’m a rules kind of girl.
“West,” I whisper.
It’s supposed to sound calm and businesslike, but instead it sounds like I’m begging him for something, and I guess he takes that as a cue. He drops his head toward my shoulder. His lips … I can’t be sure, but I think his lips are really close to my skin. I feel his breath near my ear, and my nipples harden.
“West, what the hell?”
“Why’d you come here, huh?” he murmurs.
And then—this is the worst-best part, by far—he turns his head and kisses my jaw, openmouthed.
It’s like satin. Like lightning.
I don’t know what it’s like.
I do know that it’s not what’s supposed to be happening at all.
Except that the atmosphere West is creating makes me feel like this is what’s supposed to be happening. Exactly this. The West menace is, like, sex in aerosol form. He’s making it with his body, and then he’s putting it all over me.
My body is into it, too. My body is on board.
My body is such a traitor.
“Why’d you have to come?” His voice is low and husky. Languid. His voice is a hook, catching on me. Reeling me in.
The music from his earbuds is a faraway drumbeat, and West doesn’t move his hands. I do, though. Mine have slid up to his neck, tangling in his hair, pulling his head down.
Okay, no, they haven’t. But they want to. They are positively itching to go rogue, and maybe he can see that in my eyes, because he makes this sound that’s not even a sound. It’s just an explosion of breath that does incendiary things to my panties.
“Tell me,” he insists.
Tell him what? I have no idea what he’s talking about. The only thing I know is if he doesn’t kiss me soon, I’m going to die. He’s so hot, and it’s not just that his skin is warm, although it is. It’s that I can feel all the energy from the fight coursing through him. He’s still jacked up and high on adrenaline and chemicals. He’s not himself. I’m not sure how I know this, but I do. West isn’t West, and I’m not Caroline. Not with him so close. Braced over me, heating me up, breathing against my neck, he feels like a guy who’s barely keeping it together. A guy who would beat the living shit out of the wrong someone if the wrong someone happened by, but who’d rather spend the rest of the afternoon and half the night fucking the right someone raw.
The right someone could be you.
I can’t believe I just thought that.
“Tell me,” he says again.
“Tell you what?”
“Why you’re here.”
I look away, to the side and up, because I want him to kiss me and I shouldn’t. I don’t know him. I’m not sure I like him. He scares me. His knuckles are split where they grip the metal shelving—gripping it so hard, they’ve turned white. West is holding himself back from what he wants to do to me, and I wonder, what happens if he lets go?
Do I let him turn me around, bend me over this shelf, sink inside me?
I try to be disgusted by the idea, but, God, I can feel a ghost of what it would be like. It would be electric. Hot and slick, full and fast, the most erotic thing that’s ever happened to me. I know it. I know.
But then it would be over, and I think I know what that would be like, too. West silent and stiff-jawed. A closed door.
I’ve never even had a conversation with him.
I push at his chest, trying to break the spell. “West. We have to talk.”
“We’re talking.”
But I don’t have his attention. His attention’s lower, as it should be, because when did his knee get between my thighs? And am I really … ? Oh. I am. I’m kind of almost riding him.
“Get off,” I say.
I’m whispering, nervous again about being overheard and despised by studying students—though I haven’t actually seen any—or, worse, being seen here, doing this. They would talk about me. They would never stop talking about me riding West’s thigh in the library barely an hour after he punched Nate in the mouth.
This is the worst possible thing I could be doing right now.
“West, get off.”
He lifts his head. His dark hair is falling in his face, and his eyes look like chips of sky.
He eases back. “What is it?”
“I have to talk to you.”
“I’m not in a talking mood right now, Caro.”
My head is clearing. Nobody’s getting bent over anything.
This is all just hormones. Adrenaline. It’s got to be. West is biologically driven to want to rut with something after his testosterone-fueled display of masculinity, and I’m … I guess I’m biologically driven to be rutted on.
But I’m strong. I can rise above my biology.
I think.
“Too bad,” I say, “because that’s why I was looking for you. So we could converse like civilized beings.”
West just levels that stare at me.
“Not rutting beasts,” I add.
“I’m a beast,” he says slowly. “And we’re rutting?”
He doesn’t like the word rutting. He spits it out like he’s disgusted with it.