Deeper

I'm pretty sure I was still smiling when I lost consciousness.

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 trying. 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 looked 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.

“Did you drive here?” I asked.

The corner of his mouth quirked up, but he sounded very serious when he said “Yes.”

“From where?”

“Oregon.”

“Wow.”

That made his mouth hitch up a little more, almost into a smile.

“How far is that?”

“About two thousand miles.”

I looked at his car. I looked in his car.

Okay, so the truth is, I stepped closer to his car, away from him, and leaned over and peered inside the windows. The back seat was crammed with camping gear and an aquarium full of light bulbs and tangled electrical wire, plus a giant clear trash bag, moist inside with condensation, that appeared to contain dirt. There was also a huge box full of cans of Dinty Moore Beef Stew and a few randomly flung shirts.

The car looked like a hobo lived in it. I was fascinated.

I was also kind of afraid to keep looking at him. I could see from his reflection in the car window that he was stretching his arms behind his back, which had the effect of tightening his T-shirt and putting things on display I was probably better off not looking at.

“You drove by yourself?” I asked.

“Sure.”

He lifted his arms up into the air to stretch his shoulders. His shirt rode up, and I glanced away from his reflection, embarrassed. “With the windows down?”

I was just making words with my mouth at that point. All sense had abandoned me.

“Yeeeeeah,” he said slowly. When I snuck a look at him, his eyes were full of mischief. “Sometimes I even got crazy and stuck an arm out.”

I felt my throat flush hot. Returning to being unforgivably nosy about his car seemed the wisest course of action.

I noticed a sleeping bag on the front seat and wondered if he’d been using it right there where it lay. Did he just pull over on the side of the road, lower the passenger seat, and sleep? Did he eat cold stew out of cans? Because that was definitely a can opener in the cup holder.

And that was definitely a slightly crushed, open box of condoms on the passenger bay floor.

“Don’t you worry about botulism?”

Now, in my defense, I actually did have a reason for the question. I saw the cans, noticed that a number of them were dented and dinged up, and then remembered this high school bio class where we learned about anaerobic bacteria and how it grows in airless places. Sometimes cans get dented and there’s a teensy tiny hole that you can’t even see, but bacteria get in, and they go crazy replicating themselves. But when you open the can it just looks normal, so you eat it, and you die.

It all made sense in my head. It wasn’t until I straightened and turned around—which made me dizzy again, I guess because I’d been bent over too far, peering into his car like some kind of peep-show freak—that I realized it hadn’t made any sense to him. His eyebrows were all knit together.

“From the cans. With the dents,” I said.

No change in the eyebrows.

“Anaerobic bacteria? Gruesome, painful death?”

He shook his head slowly back and forth, and then he did the worst thing.

He grinned.

It was like a nuclear attack.

“You’re a weird one, aren’t you?” he asked.

I’m not the guy with condoms and beef stew in my car.

I didn’t say it, though. I was too busy smiling like a complete idiot.

West’s grin has that effect on me. He doesn’t deploy it often, but when he does, I go brain dead.

Also, the world had gotten kind of fuzzy and sideways at the edges. My butt hit something hard, which upon further investigation turned out to be his car door, and then I was sinking down, resting my forehead against the hot front tire and saying, “It’s because they don’t have helper monkeys.”

I don’t even know what I meant. I was all addled and sleepy, suddenly, and he was really close, reaching for me. I felt his breath on my neck, heard him mumble something about get inside and you.

I liked the sound of that.

A heavy weight on my shoulders turned out to be his arm coming around me, easing me down to my back. For one slow, perfect beat of my heart, he was poised on his elbows above me, his hips pressing into mine. He smelled good. Warm and rich, like something amazing to eat that would melt on my tongue.

Then he shifted away, and we were lying side by side on the ground. I wondered vaguely if my desire for him to climb back on top of me made me a bad girlfriend. Did it count as cheating? Because I liked his hands on me. I liked the smell of him.

I closed my eyes and breathed in West Leavitt and green grass and warm earth.

I’m pretty sure I was still smiling when I lost consciousness.