Everyone else I know works so hard to separate childhood from college, to prove we’re grown up and those years are far in the past. Not West.

It’s not because he’s still a child. I wonder if it’s because he never was.

I can’t imagine West’s childhood. I can’t imagine anything about his life away from here.

There’s nothing much in the room. No decorations. No Christmas lights. No sign that he’s loved or that he loves anything.

It’s not inviting, but it’s Thursday morning. Nine o’clock, according to the display on his alarm clock. I’m barefoot, wrapped in a blue fleece blanket from the couch, and I feel invited.

He invited me.

I walk to his bed and take off my jeans.

I flip back the covers. I climb in behind him.

I put my arm over him, nestling it up beside his arm. Tuck my knees behind his. He’s not wearing pants; his leg hair is ticklish on my thighs, and I wonder briefly if I should be doing this. If he’ll be angry with me for taking a liberty.

But West is the one who made it so we’d be alone, and here we are, on the verge of not being able to see each other for a month.

Mostly I do it because right next to West is where I want to be.

With my head on his pillow, I can feel him breathing, slow and steady. He’s warm and heavy, safe and so dangerously essential.

I close my eyes. He smells like bread and soap.

I drift.

When I wake up, we’ve flipped positions. He’s spooned behind me, and the energy is different.

He’s awake.

All over.

“Caroline.” His voice is low and husky, with an edge to it I’ve never heard.

“Mmm?”

“You’re in my bed.”

“Yeah. You looked cozy.”

“It’s ten o’clock. Thursday.”

I roll to my back. He rolls right on top of me, lifting my arm above my head. Our eyes meet, and then our lips.

The kiss is sleepy, lazy, but insistent. You’re in my bed.

This is how I get kissed if I’m in his bed.

My shirt is just a T-shirt. My bra is boring and white. I could probably use a shower. I have morning breath.

He kisses me like I’m delicious.

He peels off the layers of my clothing as though he’s going to find some fabulous treasure underneath, then strokes his hands over my naked body as if to say, This. This is it. You.

His shirt comes off. He’s gorgeous—tan and flawless, muscular and lean. I lick his biceps. Bite his shoulder. He tastes clean and alive, like everything I want.

In minutes we’re down to his boxer briefs and my panties, and I’m writhing. Actually writhing. It isn’t a thing I knew I was capable of doing, but with West it isn’t even a choice. I have to. Our tongues are at war, my hands on his ass, tugging him closer, closer, always closer.

I’m so wet. Wet through my underwear, I’m sure of it, and the tip of his erection is probing, pushing my panties a few centimeters inside me with the weight of his body and his slow, rolling thrusts. Two thin layers of fabric between us, moist, slippery, insubstantial. Our hips come together in time with our mouths, our tongues, our straining need.

I need him. I need him. I can’t think about anything else. My hands find the waistband of his briefs and slip inside to find the clench of his muscles under my palms.

“Jesus,” he says, with his face against my neck. “Don’t.”

I take my hands away, discouraged. West looks at me. Kisses the wrinkle between my eyebrows, the tip of my nose, my chin, my mouth. “Come on, I didn’t mean it like that. You’re killing me, that’s all.”

“I want to be killing you.”

I want you inside me. Deep. Deeper.

Please.

The words are at the back of my tongue, piled up, and I can’t make myself say them. I can’t ask.

“I want to make you come,” he says.

That would also be excellent.

He strokes his hand up my leg, and I make this sound that’s like a squeak. I guess he likes it, because he kisses me hard. His palm starts over again, sliding from my neck to the cap of my shoulder. It slips over my collarbone to cup my breast and drag slowly over my nipple and then down, down to my waist, to my navel, to the space between our bellies. “I need to touch you.”

“Please.”

He shifts to the side, leaves his thigh slung over mine, his elbow by my arm, his breath at my ear as he caresses my breasts with the back of his hand. Brushes back and forth over my nipples. Traces circles, random patterns, until I’m ready to hurt him because the anticipation is killing me, and I say, “West, please, please,” and he relents. He flattens his hand and slides it slowly—agonizingly slowly—down my stomach. Over my navel. Right to the margin of my panties, which are ridiculous red-and-white-striped cotton with holly berries on them and this cartoon Santa, the least sexy panties I own.

I didn’t know I’d be here, that this would happen. I had no idea what this morning would bring. This cautious lifting up of the elastic. This wicked, knowing, dirty sneak underneath.

I never could have imagined the feeling of West’s hand cupping me. His fingers parting me, tracing the secret shapes of my body, the sound of his voice saying, “Fucking hell, Caro,” like a prayer and a compliment.

He presses his finger inside me. Then another. When he tries three, I whimper, and he finds my clit with his thumb. I arch off the bed, deliciously shocked.

There is a sense in which I’ve done this before, all of it, but it feels brand new and astonishingly different. It feels so good that it hurts, it aches, and I hate it, but not nearly as much as I love it.

“You like that,” he says.

I mewl. Like a cat. And his grin is so smug, I reach up to give him a playful smack, but he changes the angle of his fingers inside me and I end up yanking him closer by the hair, kissing him so hard that our teeth knock together and I bite my tongue. I don’t care. Not with West’s thumb circling my clit, over and over, just a little too hard, which turns out to be how I like it.

Not with his fingers moving in and out of my body, a steady rhythm that fractures me into a thousand desperate, craving pieces.

“That’s my girl,” he says, when I have to turn my face away because I can’t concentrate on kissing, can’t breathe, can’t do anything but buck against his hand, senseless as an animal. “Just like that.”

When I come, it’s terrible. This low gathering tension winds and winds until I think I’ll die, and then I do die, I do, and it feels so amazing that it hurts. West stays with me right through it, watches me, eases me down, and now I can feel the rush of it, the part that’s all pleasure in one big push, a wave, a wake, a wave, until it’s grabbed me everywhere, pulled me in and let me go.

I float.

“Oh my God,” I whisper, when I can speak again. My voice is faint. Sweat has gathered at my elbows, in my armpits, at my temples. The wetness between my legs has spread down my thighs, and I’m conscious of the smell of sex.

Nate called it “that fish smell” once. He joked about it.

Fuck you, Nate, I think faintly, but there’s no rancor in it. I honestly don’t care.

I feel so good.

It wasn’t like this with Nate. I came, but it was a goal that had to be reached. An obstacle to be laboriously climbed toward so that we could move on to the next thing, and then the next. It was never this … this bliss, this shared thing West and I make between us, a natural outcome of our being together rather than the product of our dogged efforts.

“Hey, where’d you go?”

West is propped on one elbow beside me, his hand flat on my stomach, resting. Poor hand, it must be exhausted. I give it a pat, then link our fingers together. He smiles and lets his elbow slide, settling onto the mattress. I’m too tired to do anything but look at him. His face, his chest, his stomach, his briefs, dark gray with their intriguing bulge and an even more intriguing wet spot.