Robin York - Deeper

I have to look away from her. Take a breath.

I point at a lump of dough. “Wash your hands, and I’ll let you knead that.”

“Will you, now?”

“I will. I’m going to teach you to make the best sourdough loaf in Putnam County.”

“Is anybody else in Putnam County making sourdough loaves?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

She makes a face at the bread, but she’s pulling her sweatshirt over her head. “All right. I’m game.”

The shirt she’s got on underneath—it’s got to be her pajama shirt. She’s not wearing a bra.

I get four more loaves ready while she’s washing her hands at the sink. It takes two before I’ve managed to push the surprise away.

I do another one with my eyes closed, willing the soft bounce of her breasts from my head.

When she comes back from the sink, her face is serious. “Listen. I’m … I’m just going to say this. I meant what I told you at the library.”

“Which thing you told me?”

She’s picking at her thumb with her fingernail. “I can’t be your friend. Or—or anything else.”

I get it.

Doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, a little, to hear it again, but I really do get it.

For all that I had my reasons for not talking to her last year, she’s got her own reasons, too. There was Nate. There was her dad, who hated my guts even before I set about deliberately lighting his fuse. But underneath all that, there was this other thing.

Caroline’s not the kind of girl who gets mixed up with a guy who’s dealing. She’s the type who plays it safe, does what she’s supposed to, follows all the rules.

Maybe if I were who I’m pretending to be when I’m at Putnam, me and Caroline would be possible, but I’m not. We don’t make sense together.

It’s fine.

“Tell you what,” I say. “Tonight I’m going to show you how to make a decent loaf and bake it. If you come back tomorrow, I’ll teach you something else. We don’t need to be friends. We can just do this … you know, this nighttime thing. If you want to.”

“Can we?”

“When Bob’s not here, it’s my bakery. I can do whatever I want as long as I get the bread made.”

“And you won’t …”

When she looks right at me, my hands twitch.

You won’t, West.

You fucking won’t.

“We’ll make bread and be not-friends. You don’t have to come within ten feet of my ears. I don’t want that from you, anyway.”

What’s one more lie on top of all the others?

She pokes experimentally at the dough in front of her. “All right. Show me how you do this thing, then.”

I show her, and then I show her the rest of it. She stays until her loaf comes out of the oven. By then she’s yawning.

I send her home to bed with warm bread tucked under her arm. I make her text me when she’s back at the dorm, safe behind a locked door.

The next night, she comes back.

She keeps coming back, and I keep letting her.

That’s how I get to be not-friends with Caroline Piasecki.

When I think of the bakery, I think of all of it together.

The crunch of fall leaves piled up on the threshold of the back door where they’d blown down the alley and stuck.

The gleam of the mixing bowls and countertops underneath the banked fluorescents when West finished cleaning and locked up.

The smell of baking bread, the crumbling clay of live yeast between my fingers, West’s voice behind my ear as he leaned over my shoulder and watched me drop it into the bowl, saying, “Just like that. Exactly.”

The way he moved his arm in short, sure strokes when he sliced open the tops of the loaves right before he pushed the rack of trays into the oven.

Winter came late. October turned into November, and I spent a long, crisp autumn of flour-strewn countertops and rising dough, sticky fingers and loud music and West working with his ball cap turned backward, an apron tied around his waist, and that smart-ass grin on his face.

West is the bakery. I can’t imagine the point of it without him in it, and I can’t imagine him—the best version of him, the one he rarely lets people see—without that kitchen as the backdrop for his movements.

West bending down to measure out a scoop of grain.

West nudging the oven door closed with his shoulder, setting the timer.

West kneading with both hands, flour dusted all the way up to his elbows, moving to the easy rhythm of some cheesy club music Krish had picked out.

There, in the bakery, while the rest of the world was sleeping, time buckled and we found something outside it. We became us in that kitchen. Long before he kissed me, I passed a whole lifetime with West, bathed in yellow light, baptized in lukewarm tap water, consecrated at sunrise when we broke a loaf open and looked. Dug our hands into it. Tasted what we’d made.

It wasn’t perfect, what we made. One night I forgot the salt. Another time, the water I put in was too hot, and I killed the yeast. There were nights when West forgot to tell me some vital thing and nights when he decided not to remind me, just to see if I’d remember.

He held himself back, and I wasn’t always brave enough. I didn’t trust myself.

We failed as often as we succeeded, West and me.

But I think about what would have happened if he hadn’t come out to get me.

I think I might have stayed in my car forever. I might have made only right turns.

I might never have learned how to stop being afraid, and those men would have kept chasing me around, always.

I can’t be anything but glad that’s not the way things went.

Instead, West came out, and I went in.

After that, I rarely wanted to be anywhere else.

“You’re buzzing again.”

I’m in my nook, a little area on the bakery floor between the sink and the long table against the wall where West lines up his mixing bowls. I like it here because I can only usually see a slice of him at a time.

I watch his boots, his pant legs from the knees down, his apron.

During this part of the night, when he’s mixing, he’s always moving. Rocking from one foot to the other if he’s feeding and stirring the sourdough starter. Pacing from the sink to the mixer to the refrigerator to the storage room, back to the mixer, back to the sink, over to the counter to pick up a tool he’s forgotten.

The way he moves is almost more than I can take. His lazy grace. His competence.

His arms come into view as he lifts one bowl off the stand and puts the next one on. He bends over, and I see his hat and his neck, his face in profile, his jeans tight over his bent leg, the shape of his calf.

I can handle him in pieces. They’re all nice pieces, but they don’t make me break out in a nervous sweat, like I did last night when it was time to head home and he walked me to the back door, propped his hand up on the jamb, and said something that made him smile down at me and lean in. I don’t know what it was. I couldn’t hear him, because the way he had his arm braced made his shirt sleeve ride up to reveal his whole biceps, a defined curve of taut muscle engaged against the doorframe. I fell into a biceps wormhole, and then I made the grave error of looking at his mouth, the shape of his lips and his cheekbones, his chin and his eyes. I forgot to listen to him.

I forgot to breathe or exist outside of West’s face.

Yeah. That’s a thing that can happen, apparently, and when it happens, it’s really bad. He had to snap his fingers in front of my nose to wake me up. It made me startle, and I stepped backward and nearly fell down. West just smiled kind of indulgently.

“Text me when you get home,” he said, and I said something that sounded like gnugh.

I guess he’s used to me being hopeless around him. We both just pretend I’m not. It sort of works.

West and I are like that. We sort of work.

I’ve been coming to the bakery two or three nights a week—almost every shift he’s on, I’m here. Insomnia has made me her bitch, but it doesn’t matter so much when I can hang out with West and study in my little nook. I nap after class. I’m turning into a creature of the night. It’s all right, though. I guess I’d rather be Bella Swan hanging out at the Cullen place than, you know, school Bella—all pissy and defensive, clomping around Forks High, convinced everyone hates her.

The men in my head are quiet when I’m at the bakery. I think if they called me names, West would glower at them and tell them to shut the fuck up. If they were real, I mean. Which they’re not.

West’s phone is still buzzing, vibrating itself partway off the edge of the tabletop. I poke out a finger and push it back to safety. “Dough boy,” I say, loud, because it’s hard to hear with the mixer going. “Your phone.”

“What?”

“Your phone.”

I point, and he finally understands. He walks over and picks it up off the metal countertop right beside me.

I made the mistake of grabbing it once, thinking I would hand it to him. The look on his face—he has this way of shutting down his whole expression so it looks like there’s no feeling in him at all.

He’s hilariously funny when he wants to be, wickedly smart, open and teasing—and then suddenly I step over some invisible line and he’s a robot. Or too intense, complaining about how something is bullshit, like he did that first night I came here.